You may remember that at our Board meeting back in December, we decided that our advice on eating peanuts when pregnant, breast-feeding and weaning needed to change. This is because a major review by the Committee on Toxicity, an independent Advisory Committee, has shown that the science has moved on since 1998 when the evidence was last reviewed. We now know that there is no clear evidence that eating or not eating peanuts or food containing peanuts during these early life stages influences the chances of a child developing a peanut allergy.
As with a lot of science, the issue isn’t straightforward, so we have spent a long time trialling our advice to ensure that healthcare professionals and parents understand it. We have now changed our advice and, although the new advice is not clear-cut, it is based on the latest science.
Our advice now is that if you would like to eat peanuts or foods containing peanuts during pregnancy or breastfeeding you can choose to do so provided you are not peanut allergic. Where a child has any kind of allergy (food or otherwise), or there is a history of allergy in the child’s immediate family, we recommend that parents consult a health professional when introducing foods containing peanut into the baby's diet for the first time.
This is because these children are at a higher risk of developing allergy.
One of the consequences of using the most up-to-date scientific research is that our advice can’t always be black and white. As I’ve said before in previous blogs on this, the inconsistent evidence and developments on this issue make it difficult for us to give definitive advice in this area but this reflects that even rigorous and precise scientific research doesn’t always produce clear-cut answers.
The issues of whether or not to eat peanuts during pregnancy and breastfeeding, and, even more so, of when it is best to introduce peanut into a child’s diet, are still developing areas in terms of science. The Agency is actively funding studies in these areas to move our understanding forward. However, in the meantime it is the Agency’s absolute commitment and responsibility to ensure that we offer advice to pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers (and to the rest of the public) based on the most up-to-date and robust science – which is indeed developing all the time.