Dr. Aaron Hartman says the AAP's advice to delay peanuts until age three backfired. Peanut allergies went from 0.4% in 1997 to 1.4% by 2010. The 2015 LEAP study found early exposure cuts allergy risk by 84%.
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What if I told you that we started the peanut and nut allergy epidemic in our country? And what if I told you it was actually started by some of the top physicians in our country? Let's look at the facts and look at the data. Back in 2000, the American Academy of Pediatricians recommended stopping kids from eating peanuts and waiting till later on in life, waiting till age 3. The idea was to decrease and minimize the risk for peanut allergies in our country. Back at this point in time, you think about 1997, the incidence of peanut allergies was 0.4%. It went up to 1.4% by 2010, tripled in 10 years, and by the end of this time frame, increased almost fivefold. What's going on here? Well, in 2015, the LEAP study actually looked and said that if you actually take peanuts and expose earlier in the kid's life, they actually have an 84% reduction in peanuts. So what's the point? Stopping early exposure to nuts actually has been a major factor in the peanut allergy in our country, and we MD now recognizes this as a major blind spot their healthcare system just got wrong. The question is, how often do we do things like this? How often do physicians, well-meaning, well-intentioned organizations, academics, etc., recommend good, healthy things that are actually harmful in the end? Happens all the time. We call these medical blind spots. We're going to be talking about these a lot on social. So if you're curious about what our healthcare system has gotten wrong, follow us, like, share, subscribe. This is going to be a really interesting ride over the next, you couple months as we kind of dive into things our system thought was right, were just plain wrong. Take care.
