Early Peanut Exposure

It’s hard to imagine that a hint of any type of food that a person may be allergic to can kill them in an instant. In present day there are all sorts of medications that prevent fatal injury when people consume foods that they are allergic to. I guess the question really arises when we want to know when you know when you are allergic. How can we prevent someone from finding out without a tragic experience? Well The beginning of all humans comes from birth, so this is must be where it all begins.

An allergic reaction to peanut butter in infancy is one of the many significant public health issues today. It is common to see someone over the age of six having an allergic reaction to peanut butter and have to take out an epipen or something like it to cure them of getting an instantaneous reaction like anaphylaxis or from dying. So when a baby is still in the mother’s womb how we know what that baby is allergic too. Must we wait until there is an incident?

When the body is allergic to something it reacts. Usually what makes an allergen what it is, is that when it enters the body it is seen as a foreign body itself. So the body uses a specific protein to create a specific protein for that allergen. This way when the allergy enters the body again you will have an allergic reaction. Of course this takes time and depends on how much exposure is received in order for the body to have had time to create this specific protein. This is the process a baby must go through except it takes them much longer because they probably wont have all that exposure and because their bodies and immune system are not developed enough.

Researchers suggested that perhaps it be a good idea that pregnant woman hold out on consuming peanut butter during pregnancy. Yet they saw that the rates for this incident were low but what about the few that it happens to? This of course seems like the best idea as a solution to this public health problem because there is no way of telling what allergies a baby might come out having. Sometimes these allergies are learnt by the body and sometimes hereditary. If there is no way of telling its better not to take such a risk as it is better to be safe than sorry.


Cambridge Journals Online. Version doi:10.1017/S0007114509993813. British Journal of Nutrition, n.d. Web. 9 Feb. 2010 .


Posted by Jean Fedna