Breaking Health News: Study Finds Exposure to Peanuts May Help Prevent Allergies

The medical community has long told parents to avoid giving peanut products to young children, but a highly anticipated new study suggests a diet that includes the legumes in the first year of life may greatly reduce the chance of developing peanut allergies, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Some physicians now go as far as to say not eating peanuts may have helped spur more allergies.

"We have had a whole ethos within the practice of pediatrics and pediatric allergy that the way to avoid any allergy was avoidance," said Gideon Lack, a professor of pediatric allergy at King's College London. "At least with respect to peanuts, avoidance may actually worsen the problem."

Lack is a senior author of the study that was published on Monday in the New England Journal of Medicine. The trial focused on babies as young as four months who had already developed eczema, considered an early warning sign of allergies, the BBC noted.

Half of the study's subjects were given a peanut-based snack, while the other half continued avoiding peanuts. Normally, 14 out of every 100 children would go on to develop an allergy by the age of 5; but the figure fell to just two out of every 100 children for those who had been exposed to the legumes.

The stunning 86 percent reduction did not hold true for youngsters who were already becoming sensitive to peanuts. Nevertheless, they, too, benefited as their allergy rates fell from 35 percent to 11 percent.

Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told USA Today the findings were "without precedent." The Bethesda, Maryland-based U.S. government agency helped fund the study of 640 children.

"The results have the potential to transform how we approach food allergy prevention," Fauci said.

Peanut allergies have become increasingly common over the past decade with their prevalence doubling to 3 percent of children in developed countries, the study noted. Its results were presented Monday at a meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology in Houston.