Peanut allergies can be deadly, and if a parent has one, their children are at higher risk of developing one too. For many years, the guidelines for at-risk babies, based on previous research, were to avoid giving them peanuts until they were at least three years old and for breastfeeding mothers to avoid peanuts as well. It turns out this advice was exactly backwards: a high-quality randomised trial in 2015 showed that only around 2 per cent of at-risk children who ate peanuts early in life developed an allergy to them by age five, compared to the almost 14 per cent of at-risk children who
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