Dr. Zachary Rubin

One, which you may have heard about on the news, which is we used to recommend delaying introduction of highly allergenic foods like peanuts

until later in life, like two to three years of age, depending on the food.

But that was meant for only high-risk individuals, like children who have eczema, as an example.

We then learned a study called Learning Early About Peanut, or the LEAP study.

It randomized kids to either consume peanut protein before they turned one regularly, or wait until they turned five.

And delaying the introduction

significantly increase the risk of those children developing peanut allergies.

If you introduced it before one, there's about an 80% less likely chance of that happening.

Not 100%, but something that we recognize now that we've changed the guidelines over the past 10 years or so, and we're starting to see a slow decline in food allergy rates, especially for peanut allergies as an example.

There's also associations between C-sections, early antibiotic use, and early antacid use.

These are all issues related to the gut microbiome.

That's the bacterial milieu that helps process foods and present it to our immune system.

And so if you take antibiotics early in life, that could kill not just bad bacteria, but good bacteria.

If you're born through C-section, you're not exposed to the birth canal and the bacterial flora that is present.

If you take antacids, that could also disrupt the gut microbiome.

We also have increases in eczema prevalence.

eczema is a chronic itchy skin condition characterized by a disrupted skin barrier.

So when any foreign substance comes into contact with a disrupted skin barrier, your immune system in your skin recognizes that material is foreign and could create an allergic response to it.

And that is what we call the atopic march or allergic march, where someone who was born early on develops eczema, they're more likely to develop

hay fever, food allergies, and asthma later in life because they're all interconnected.