New Study Says Feeding Kids Eggs Early in Life Helps Prevent Food Allergy

Pediatricians used to tell parents to wait until children were toddlers before feeding them foods like peanuts and egg, common causes of food allergy. The theory was that early exposure to such allergens might be driving the development of food allergies, in which the immune system reacts to harmless food molecules as if they were dangerous.

But that did not stop allergy rates in U.S. children from going up—by 50 percent from 1997 to 2011.

It turns out that giving children allergens early actually reduces the likelihood that they will develop an allergy. A landmark 2015 study found this to be true for peanuts. The U.S. National Institutes of Health released updated guidelines in 2017 encouraging early exposure, and scientists were able to show last year that this led to a drop in peanut-allergy diagnoses. Judging from the scale of the decrease, tens of thousands of diagnoses were averted.

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