Feeding Babies Peanuts Has Helped Thousands Dodge Allergies

A decade after groundbreaking research showed that feeding peanut products to babies could prevent life-threatening allergies, new evidence confirms that the approach has made a major real-world impact.

According to a study published Monday in Pediatrics, an estimated 60,000 children have avoided developing peanut allergies since U.S. health authorities issued new guidance in 2015 recommending that parents introduce peanuts to infants as early as four months old.

“That’s a remarkable thing, right?” said Dr. David Hill, an allergist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and lead author of the study. Hill and his team analyzed medical records from dozens of pediatric practices, tracking allergy diagnoses before and after the new recommendations.

The findings show that peanut allergies among children ages 0 to 3 dropped by more than 27% following the 2015 guidelines for high-risk infants, and by over 40% after the recommendations were expanded in 2017. “There are fewer kids with food allergies today than there would have been if we hadn’t implemented this public health effort,” Hill said.

While the overall number of children with food allergies in the U.S. remains high—affecting about 8% of kids, including 2% with peanut allergies—researchers say the progress is encouraging.

For decades, doctors had advised parents to delay introducing peanuts and other common allergens until after age three. That changed after the landmark Learning Early About Peanut Allergy (LEAP) trial, led by Dr. Gideon Lack of King’s College London in 2015. The LEAP study found that early exposure to peanut products could reduce the risk of peanut allergy by more than 80%, with protection lasting into adolescence for most children.

The new research offers “promising evidence that early allergen introduction is not only being adopted but may be making a measurable impact,” the authors wrote.

Updated guidance released in 2021 encourages parents to introduce peanuts and other common allergens—such as milk, soy, and tree nuts—between four and six months of age, without prior screening or allergy testing.

“It doesn’t have to be a lot of food,” Hill explained. “Small tastes of peanut butter, milk-based yogurt, soy yogurt, or nut butters are excellent ways to help the immune system safely learn to tolerate these foods.”

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