| Health / Health News |
Peanut allergy prevention strategy is nutritionally safe
NIH | JUNE 18, 2016
Introducing peanut-containing foods during infancy as a peanut allergy prevention strategy does not compromise the duration of breastfeeding or affect children’s growth and nutritional intakes, new findings show.
Peanut. 
Primary results from the Learning Early About Peanut Allergy (LEAP) trial, published in 2015, showed that introducing peanut products into the diets of infants deemed at high risk for peanut allergy led to an 81 percent relative reduction in subsequent development of the allergy compared to avoiding peanut altogether. The goal of the current analysis was to determine whether eating high doses of peanut products beginning in infancy would have any adverse effects on infant and child growth and nutrition.
In the current analysis, an important and reassuring finding was that peanut consumption did not affect the duration of breastfeeding, thus countering concerns that introduction of solid foods before six months of age could reduce breastfeeding duration.
In addition, the researchers did not observe differences in height, weight or body mass index — a measure of healthy weight status — between the peanut consumers and avoiders at any point during the study.
Overall, these findings indicate that early-life introduction of peanut-containing foods as a strategy to prevent the subsequent development of peanut allergy is both feasible and nutritionally safe, even at high levels of peanut consumption.
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