Ignore 'Forget Everything You Know About...'

When my daughter was an infant, I recall sometimes hearing that one should avoid feeding peanut products to infants. I ignored that advice in part because most nutritional advice in popular media is the knee-jerk opinion of noncientists who usually don't know how to evaluate or contextualize new scientific findings -- which is then sensationalized. (It does not help when government bodies help spread such manure, as I believe was the case here.)

These types will tell you your life depends on X today, X will kill you tomorrow, and your life depends on X the day after, all without batting an eye.

The well-known toggling alone should raise one's hackles. In addition, taking such extreme advice often requires one to ignore other parts of one's knowledge, such as If X is going to kill you/make you bullet-proof, how are so many people who eat X doing just fine/unwell now? There needs to be solid reasoning behind any recommendation.

Experts give advice, not commandments.

Only a few short years after ignoring that kind of advice, I was unsurprised to read that scientists challenged the idea that ... one should leave an infant's immune system unchallenged:

It is interesting to consider what take-home lesson one might derive from this. I don't think it's, "Slop the pigs with peanut butter and marinate your baby in their pen for six hours a day," any more than, "Avoid peanuts entirely," was to the knowledge that repeated exposure to an allergen might cause an allergy to develop. I take it to be something like, "Relax, and let science take its slow and meandering, yet steady, course to the truth."

Even without modern controversies about the reliability of individual publications, biological systems are complex enough that one should usually place more weight on what one can observe over history: Millions have lived long lives with peanuts and wheat in their diets: These things are likely safe for most people. Both foods have attracted research interest, and that might merit some attention, particularly if one is from, say, an allergy-prone family. But without evidence so compelling as to overturn everything else I know about a subject, I don't normally see individual scientific studies as reasons by themselves to deviate from common practices. (And I'm setting aside my great suspicion of things that get enormous amounts of media coverage.) [bold added]

Today, I am even less surprised to learn that, as much as avoiding peanuts was touted in the past, it had been forgotten (or the truth has percolated down to the general public) enough that the bad effects of that advice are abating:

For decades, as food allergy rates climbed, experts recommended that parents avoid exposing their infants to common allergens. But a landmark trial in 2015 found that feeding peanuts to babies could cut their chances of developing an allergy by over 80 percent. In 2017, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases formally recommended the early-introduction approach and issued national guidelines.

The new study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, found that food allergy rates in children under 3 fell after those guidelines were put into place -- dropping to 0.93 percent between 2017 and 2020, from 1.46 percent between 2012 and 2015. That's a 36 percent reduction in all food allergies, driven largely by a 43 percent drop in peanut allergies. [bold added]

Good, and the piece confirms that the advice to avoid peanuts had been promulgated by the government.

It is interesting to consider whether, had non-government entities been in charge of advising the public on such matters, we'd have so much ever-changing (and sometimes life-threateningly bad) advice.

-- CAV