New guidelines suggest introducing peanut products earlier to prevent allergies

But one Medicine Hat mom isn’t sure a few months would have changed her daughter’s reaction.

“I know that for the reaction your tongue will go numb, your lips will go numb, then you would start wheezing,” said 13-year-old Aurora Baxter.

It’s a feeling she’s all too familiar with.

Baxter found out the hard way at a very young age that she was allergic to peanuts.

“It was quite a bad one with lots of hives, swelling,” her mother, Amanda, said. “It was a pretty scary reaction ’cause she was 18 months old.”

Amanda said she craved peanut butter and banana on toast while she was pregnant with her daughter.

It was a snack she kept eating while she breast fed.

But feeding Aurora crackers and peanut butter before she turned two could have been deadly.

“It was definitely really scary,” her mom said. “Then you look through all the stuff in your cupboards and you realize how much stuff has a nut warning on it.”

“The idea of even pregnant mothers still using peanut based products, if they’re not allergic themselves, introduces the proteins back into the body,” said pharmacist Dr. Dan Reich.

Reich agrees parents should introduce their kids to peanuts early in life, giving the body a chance to get use to the new food.

The guidelines suggest introducing peanut products as early as six months old and in some cases, even earlier.

“Your body’s able to recognize certain proteins and it creates the antibodies,” he said. “It’s the same idea as any vaccine.”

Reich said genetics can play a role and some allergies can’t be avoided.

While Amanda said peanut allergies don’t run in the family, she’s not sure if introducing peanuts even earlier than 18 months would have had a different outcome.

“I really had no idea that this was going to happen,” she said.

by Ashley Wiebe

New guidelines suggest introducing peanut products earlier to prevent allergies

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