Are peanuts safe during pregnancy?
Here is the short and curly on this: there is not a significant amount of evidence that supports peanut consumption during your pregnancy will increase the chances of your child having a peanut allergy.
The problem is that there have been some small studies that support it and some small studies that don't.
Ten years ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that women with babies at increased risk of allergy due to family history avoid peanut products while pregnant or breastfeeding. However, avoidance didn't seem to make a difference, as peanut allergies were still on the rise, so the recommendation was withdrawn in 2008 due to limited scientific evidence to support it.
One study followed kids in the UK and kids in Israel and found that the kids in Israel had a lower incident of peanut allergies yet consumed peanuts at a much earlier age and their mothers didn't avoid peanuts during their pregnancies. Yet aother study found that a group of women that consumed peanuts during pregnancy had babies that had strong sensitivity to peanuts based on their blood tests.
Peanut allergies are a scary thing and they certainly shouldn't be taken lightly. Unfortunately, nobody knows what causes them yet so we're ending up with a lot of theoretical advice. What's worse is the media likes to lead with "Rise in Allergies from Peanut Consumption During Pregnancy", while showing a close-up photo of a belly holding a gerbera daisy and a jar of peanut butter. It's not until you're completely freaked out that they decide to mention that it was a very small study so there's no conclusive evidence yet. You've extracted "Killer Peanuts" from the headline and bought the magazine, so their job is done.
Sadly, it looks like we'll still have to wait on the peanut debate a little longer but from what I read, it doesn't look like you need to put away the jar of Skippy just yet.
It's peanut butter jelly time! Peanut butter jelly time!
search: peanut allergies pregnancy, peanut consumption pregnancy, pregnancy peanuts
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Reader Comments (4)
Allergies have interested me since they have been on the rise along with eczema (which my son has) and asthma for the past 70 years. It's believed that Hygiene theory is to explain for these rises and I wouldn't be surprised if the peanut allergy was also related. The Idea is that improvements in food handling, home construction, and general hand washing over time have exposed our kids to fewer "gut" bacteria. Since they aren't exposed to them they never trigger an immune response that will protect them from allergies (in simple terms, it's a pretty complicated series of events). Very interesting stuff though.
It is interesting and confusing and shows how mysterious our immune systems still are. My dad is an allergist so we've had many conversations about this. My husband and I are both highly allergic and my husband has asthma to boot. I avoided nuts with my first pregnancy more for 'what the heck' than good evidence, as you note. 4 year old has no allergies so far, knock wood. This pregnancy, I've been much more lax and frequently have PB or snack on nuts. So, we'll see!
I had a very "helpful" coworker bring up this peanut issue when I was in the middle of a yummy peanutty snack at work. She's lucky that she escaped unscathed as I was REALLY into peanut butter at that time. I haven't been able to find any definitive research on this subject so I am just going to keep on eating my peanut butter. That said, I do know that peanuts are often heavily sprayed when being grown so I will stick to organic to avoid any nasty pesticide toxins.
I'm beginning to think the scientific community won't be happy until all pregnant women are forced to live in a hyperbaric chamber and not allowed to eat anything except tofu and prenatal vitamins.
Either that, or they're trying to cut down on the over-populating by giving all pregnant women heart attacks.