Mission MightyMe : The Power of Peanut Puffs

Intro: Why Are Food Allergies on the Rise?

Food allergy rates are on the rise - in fact, in the last couple of decades, food allergies among children in the U.S. have increased by 50% and nut allergies have tripled!

Today, 1 in 13 children have a food allergy, which is 8% of U.S. kids, or nearly 6 million children. In the UK, Canada, and Australia, the numbers are similar. Yet in places like Israel, Asia, and parts of Africa, that’s not the case.

So why are the numbers so high in the U.S.? There could be many factors at play, but one difference between the U.S. and those other countries is that for the past two decades, the standard medical advice in the U.S. was to avoid feeding babies potentially allergenic foods, whereas they have long been a common part of the diet in other parts of the world.

In 2000, The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommended that high-risk infants avoid peanuts and other common food allergens in infancy until age 3. Although the AAP rescinded these recommendations in 2008, avoidance of peanuts and other common food allergens in infancy remained the common practice.

Recent groundbreaking research led by our co-founder, has shown that withholding peanut foods from infant diets actually increases the risk of peanut allergy up to five-fold. This discovery reversed feeding guidelines around the globe to recommend regularly including peanut foods and other common food allergens in children's diets, starting in infancy.

About 20 years ago, Dr. Gideon Lack, Head of Pediatric Allergy at King’s College in London, was in Tel Aviv giving a lecture about peanut allergies to 200 pediatricians and allergists. His key takeaways included:

• Of the 200 physicians, only 2-3 acknowledged seeing a child with a peanut allergy within that year.
• Almost universally, babies in Israel were being fed peanut snacks early in the first year of their lives.

Dr. Lack connected these observations with a phenomenon called oral tolerance induction, where introducing early feeding of food such as egg, milk, and peanuts to young mice prevented the development of food allergies.

Dr. Lack and his colleagues went on to develop an observational study comparing the rates of peanut allergy among children in Israel to peanut allergy rates among Jewish children with similar genetic ancestry in the UK. The findings were stunning! Jewish children in the UK had a ten times higher rate of peanut allergies than their Israeli counterparts. The differences in the two countries came down to feeding practices:

• Israeli infants ate approximately 1.7 grams of peanut protein per week, starting early in the first year of life.
• Like the U.S. the vast majority of UK infants weren’t eating peanuts early on in life.

While guidelines in the U.S. and UK at the time recommended that babies avoid peanut foods in infancy, peanut puffs were a staple in Israeli infant diets.

Revolutionary Research

Dr. Lack's observation in Israel led to the groundbreaking LEAP Study, designed to test his hypothesis that peanut allergy rates in Israel were lower because Israeli babies were regularly eating peanut foods, starting in infancy.

Key LEAP Study Components

• 5-year, NIH-funded, randomized controlled trial
• 640 babies between 4 and 11 months old.
• The babies had an existing egg allergy and/or severe eczema, and therefore were identified as high-risk for a peanut allergy.
• The babies were split into two groups: one group avoided peanut foods entirely and the other consumed age-appropriate peanut foods several times a week from the first year of life until age 5.

The Results

• By age 5, the rate of peanut allergies among children who avoided peanut foods, was 5 times higher than the children who had consumed peanuts regularly since infancy.
• Therefore, in high-risk infants, sustained peanut consumption beginning in the first 11 months of life was highly effective in preventing the development of peanut allergy.

“It was at that moment that I realized that maybe our advice to prevent peanut allergy was not only incorrect, but was unintentionally contributing to the rise in food allergies.”

~ Dr. Gideon Lack, Lead Author of The LEAP Study

The findings rocked the allergy world.

"We're talking about saving thousands and thousands of kids from peanut allergies."

~ NIAID Director, Dr. Anthony Fauci on the LEAP study results