Food allergies have doubled in recent years, but evidence suggests that feeding kids peanuts and eggs early reduces risk

When babies eat certain foods early in life—the kinds so many end up allergic to, like eggs and peanuts—they’re less likely to develop allergies to those foods later on, finds a new analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

This is relatively new thinking. Not so long ago, in 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that allergenic foods be kept away from infants until they were at least a year old, and often older. That warning was especially strong for those with a family history of allergies. But, as an editorial published in the same issue of JAMA points out, in the next decade, food allergy prevalence nearly doubled in the United States.

That advice has been amended, and newer evidence has shown that introducing foods earlier is actually better for preventing food allergies. The authors of the just-published study reviewed all of the available evidence on the topic and included 146 studies in their final analysis.
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