Cooking With Kids: Food Allergies in the News
Everyone seems to agree that childhood food allergies are on the rise, and nobody knows why. Newsweek steps in this week with a cover story. For the most part, it's standard news magazine fare: Kick off with a scary anecdote about a kid with a peanut allergy ("When she goes trick-or-treating this week, her candy will be scarier than any costume"), then backpedal in the last few paragraphs and admit that the problem is not actually as widespread as people think it is (only 1 in 100 kids has a peanut allergy—not reassuring at all, of course, if your child is the one).
The most interesting research in the article comes from a London researcher, Dr. Gideon Lack, who thinks maybe we should all be eating more peanuts. In places (particularly Africa) where peanuts are a staple of the diet, peanut allergies are nearly nonexistent, and it's unlikely to have much to do with genetics. A recent 60 Minutes broadcast with Anderson Cooper examined a third-world nutrition supplement called (I love this name) Plumpy'Nut, a fortified peanut butter. "What about peanut allergies?" Cooper asked Dr. Susan Shepherd, head of Doctors Without Borders in Niger.
"In developing countries, food allergy is not nearly the problem that it is in industrialized countries," Shepherd said. This could be because of exposure to pathogens (the "hygiene hypothesis"), exposure to the allergens themselves, or something altogether different.
So back in England, Lack is conducting a clinical trial, giving babies a peanut supplement to see if it will ward off peanut allergies. He cautions that you should not try this at home.
But the conventional wisdom, to withhold common allergens like peanuts and shellfish until age two (or even older) is very hard to follow. We have no history of allergies in our family, and we didn't even bother trying. Like Dr. Lack, I'm not recommending this approach, but I suspect it's common.
How did your family handle this? Did you follow the parenting book advice of introducing new foods a few days apart to watch for allergic reactions? Until your kid was how old? If your child does have an allergy, how and at what age did you diagnose it?
About the author: Matthew Amster-Burton lives in Seattle. His work appears frequently in the Seattle Times and Seattle magazine. He also maintains the blog Roots and Grubs. His favorite food is pad Thai. | Photograph from iStockphoto.com.
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