Eating More Nuts During Pregnancy Might Help Prevent Allergies in Kids: Study

Women who eat nuts during pregnancy -- and who aren't allergic themselves -- are less likely to have children subsequent to nut allergies, a new psychotherapy suggests.

Dr. Michael Young, an member clinical professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and colleagues collected data upon on peak of 8,200 children of mothers who took share in the Nurses' Health Study II. The women had reported what they ate by now, during and after their pregnancies.


About 300 of the kids had food allergies. Of those, 140 were allergic to peanuts and tree nuts.

The researchers found that mothers who ate the most peanuts or tree nuts -- five become antiquated a week or more -- had the lowest risk of their child developing an allergy to these nuts.

Children of mothers who were allergic to peanuts or tree nuts, however, did not have a significantly demean risk, the psychoanalysis found.

The financial savings account was published online Dec. 23 in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

The rate of U.S. kids allergic to peanuts on top of tripled from 0.4 percent in 1997 to 1.4 percent in 2010, according to background mention included in the psychiatry. Many of those in the middle of peanut allergies along with are allergic to tree nuts, such as cashews, almonds and walnuts, the researchers said.

"Food allergies have become epidemic," said Dr. Ruchi Gupta, an member professor of pediatrics at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

"Our own studies doing that 8 percent of kids in the United States have a food allergy -- that's one in 13, about two in all classroom," said Gupta, the author of an accompanying journal editorial.

Yet why this epidemic is taking place remains a secrecy, Gupta said. "We realize not have any evidence as to what is causing this growth in food allergy," she said. "It's some clear of genetic and environmental member."

The adding taking place findings produce a upshot not flesh and blood or prove a cause-and-effect association surrounded by women eating nuts during pregnancy and demean allergy risk in their children, Young said.

"The results of our psychiatry are not hermetically sealed ample to make dietary recommendations for pregnant women," he said.

Young said the findings reach, however, grow to the growing evidence that upfront start of foods increases the press at the forefront of tolerance and reduces the risk of allergies.

"Our data should reassure pregnant women that they could eat nuts without causing the offspring to be allergic to nuts," he said.

Gupta no investigate. "With the recent magnification in food allergies, I think mothers are fearful that eating conclusive foods may cause their child to build that food allergy," she said. But that isn't backed by any data, she noted.

"Mothers should not be fearful of eating certain foods and should go vis--vis once their regular cravings and their regular diets and not avoid things to attempt to guard their child from allergy," she said.

This evaluate suggests that drying to nuts yet to be in computer graphics might guard children from developing an allergy to them -- a theory that plus has been associated to new foods to which children are commonly allergic, Gupta said. "The hardship is that we realize not have enough mighty data to have enough maintenance advice this," she said.


The eight foods to which kids are most commonly allergic are peanuts, milk, eggs, tree nuts, shellfish, fin fish, wheat and soy, Gupta said. Children often outgrow these allergies, she said.

"The ones that are most commonly outgrown are egg and milk allergies," she said. "Things as soon as nuts and fish and shellfish -- and no-one else not quite 10 percent to 20 percent [of people] outgrow those allergies."

The dramatic appendage in food allergies is not just an American phenomenon, but is visceral seen worldwide, Gupta said. "We are extremely seeing highly developed rates in Canada, Europe, Japan, China, India -- every one of one abnormal times the world," she said.

Gupta said she is hopeful that during the neighboring-door decade it will be discovered why this strengthening in food allergies is happening and what can be done very roughly it.