Eating peanuts cause zero health risk in infants

Consuming peanuts products during early infancy can have zero effect on the growth of a child and on his or her nutrition, confirms a study.

The findings showed that peanut consumption in infancy can have no negative effect on a child's growth as well as nutrition.

"The results reassured that peanut consumption did not affect the duration of breastfeeding, thus countering concerns that introduction of solid foods before six months of age could reduce breastfeeding duration," said led author Mary Feeney from King's College London.

The research, published online in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, aimed at determining the adverse effects on child growth and nutrition as a result of taking high peanut products during early infancy along with the ones who avoid it.

"These findings indicate that early-life introduction of peanut-containing foods as a strategy to prevent the subsequent development of peanut allergy is both feasible and nutritionally safe, even at high levels of peanut consumption," said Marshall Plaut from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in the US.

The results of an earlier clinical trial showed that introducing peanut products as a part of the dietary foods for infants lead to an 81 per cent relative reduction of allergies in comparison to products that avoided peanut altogether.

For the study, the investigators randomly assigned 640 infants aged four to 11 months, which continued till the age of five, to either consume at least two grams of peanut protein three times a week or to avoid peanut entirely.

--IANS

rt/py/