Eating Nuts During Pregnancy Could Curb Kids' Allergies
Dec-26-2013

Peanut and tree nut allergies are among the most common food allergies in children and adults, and they're on the rise. A new study suggests moms-to-be could hold the key to preventing them.

Children born to non-allergic mothers who frequently ate nuts during their pregnancies had a lower risk of developing the allergy, researchers from a number of hospitals and universities including Boston Children's Hospital and the Dana-Farber Children's Cancer Center found.

"Our study supports the hypothesis that early allergen exposure increases the likelihood of tolerance and thereby lowers the risk of childhood food allergy," they wrote in a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics on Monday.

Food allergies manifest when the body's immune system mistakenly perceives a harmless food and attacks it. The resulting symptoms can be relatively mild, such as hives, or potentially life-threatening, in the case of anaphylaxis. Between 1997 and 2011, food allergies among children in the United States increased by roughly 50 percent, for reasons researchers do not fully understand.

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