It turned out that the guidance parents and pediatricians … had been following, to avoid giving peanuts to babies and young children to try to prevent the development of dangerous allergies, was completely backward.
“By thinking we were protecting them, we were actually causing the problem,” [Dr. Gideon] Lack told CNN.
The story of how he and his colleagues proved that was the case is a primer in the scientific process.
There’s a joke in Israel that the first three words babies learn are “mother,” “father” and “Bamba,” Lack said – for the peanut puff snacks that Israeli parents give babies ….
“They all told me one very clear thing: ‘We give peanut snacks to our babies from between 4 and 6 months of age.’ ”
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So he and a team of colleagues set out to study it. They looked at about 5,000 schoolchildren in Israel and 5,000 Jewish schoolchildren in London who shared a similar ancestral background – to control for genetic differences – and compared their rates of peanut allergy.
“In the UK, it was tenfold higher”: almost 2% of kids, Lack said, whereas in Israel, it “virtually didn’t exist.”
