HEALTH: Feed your baby peanut products to prevent allergy: new NIH guidelines

It’s official: Shielding your baby from nuts isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

Parents can introduce peanut-containing foods into their infants’ diets as early as four to six months to avoid potentially lethal peanut allergies down the road, according to new guidelines published Thursday by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

The panel of 26 experts’ new edict, co-published across multiple medical journals, formalizes the recent departure from pediatricians’ longstanding advice that parents withhold nuts from their kids until age 3.

A landmark NIAID-funded report released in February 2015 helped turn the tide: The Learning Early About Peanut Allergy study, using a clinical trial of 600 infants, found that introducing peanuts to babies and continuing until age 5 yielded an 81% drop in peanut allergy among kids considered “high risk” due to their severe eczema and/or egg allergy.

Researchers were inspired by a finding that Israeli babies who ate the popular peanut-buttery snack Bamba were far less likely to develop the allergy than non-Bamba-consuming Jewish children in the UK.

NIAID’s newest guidelines are threefold: For infants with severe eczema, egg allergy or both, parents should introduce peanut-containing edibles as early as four to six months — but first check with a doctor, who might advise an allergy test.

For babies with mild to moderate eczema, expose them around six months. And for those with no eczema or food allergy, parents can go nuts and “freely introduce” as they see fit. (Of course, babies in all cases should start off with other solid foods first.)

About 8% of U.S. kids live with a food allergy, according to a 2011 study, and its prevalence among children shot up 18% from 1997 and 2007, per the CDC. The most prevalent food allergen: the dreaded peanut.

“Living with peanut allergy requires constant vigilance. Preventing the development of peanut allergy will improve and save lives and lower health care costs,” NIAID director Anthony Fauci said in a statement.