Allergy Advice May Be Flawed

It turns out all of us carefully holding off on feeding solids to our babies until six months and avoiding peanut products until 12 months may not be doing the right thing after all.

In a dramatic back-flip on current guidelines, leading specialist doctors are calling for a rethink of feeding guidelines for infants, saying that stopping very young children from eating foods such as eggs, shellfish and peanuts may not prevent them developing allergies and might even be responsible for a dramatic increase in severe food reactions.

Parents and doctors have been concerned about the inexplicable rise in anaphylaxis attacks in young children, which have risen five-fold in the decade to 2005. Interestingly enough this is at the same time as parents had been warned to be cautious about introducing specific foods.

New evidence seems to suggest that you can introduce anything at any time once kids can handle solids (4-6 months), which is great, but why on earth did they change the guidelines in the first place?

The paediatric committee of the Australasian Society of Clinical Immunology and Allergy recommends changing the current guidelines from exclusive breastfeeding for six months and then at least eight months for eggs and shellfish, saying that they are unsuitable for a developed country. That’s a whole lot of books, brochures and websites to be updated, not to mention re-educating baby health nurses and doctors. We’ll keep you posted if and when new guidelines are released.

[Source/Image]