Women who eat nuts while pregnant can reduce child's allergy risk

Pregnant women who consume nuts can help reduce their child's risk of developing a food allergy.

According to a new study published in JAMA Pediatrics, women who consume peanuts or tree nuts while pregnant could help reduce their child's risk of developing a nut allergy. The study said that the more nuts a woman ate during her pregnancy, the less likely her child would become allergic. This comes as good news to parents and doctors who are increasingly worried about nut allergies, as their prevalence in children more than tripled between 1997 and 2010, when an estimated 1.4 percent of children had this type of allergy.

The study included 11,000 mothers and their children, who were followed from birth through their adolescence. It was also wide-ranging in its results, supporting medical consensus that parents should not delay introducing their children to known food allergens – such as milk, fish and eggs – because it will not reduce their risk of developing an allergy. About 1 in 13 children today suffer from a nut allergy, according to the editorial accompanying the report by Dr. Ruchi Gupta of the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

Dr. Gupta also said in her editorial that women are rightfully confused as to the guidelines of consuming nuts while pregnant, because they have changed in recent years. In 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics told women to avoid peanuts and tree nuts while pregnant and nursing, and to not expose children to any kind of nut until at least age three. This policy was reversed in 2008 when there was no direct link between age of exposure and a developed allergy.

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