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Originally Posted by Triciabn  Just thinking about this makes me wonder why so many people nowadays are celic...or have gluten sensitivities..... yet most everyone in that generation was fed cereal early...and encouraged to eat cereal in bottles with the tops cut off. I know that was more then true for my husband.
Although I haven't read that study or heard anything about it before now....I am seriously skeptical....just based on my own interactions with celiacs and other gluten intolerant people.
tricia
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There's a "window": starting solids before 4 months and after 7 is correlated to food allergies and intolerance. My guess is that the uptick in gluten allergies is partially a result of the time when mothers started solids at 3 weeks. I think there's probably also something to the fact that some people's systems just get overloaded by all the heavily processed, gluten-rich products that are part of the modern American diet. But I think actual research on that is still very much pending: that's just a theory that I've heard and it makes sense to me, based on the experiences of people I know.
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Originally Posted by Just1More That seems strange to me. I think they go back and forth on when to introduce peanuts, too, especially in people who are genetically prone to allergy. Sometimes they say early, sometimes they say late.
My experience with ds, was that it was plain he couldn't handle gluten as early as a few weeks old. It would bother him horribly when I ate it. He still can't handle much, although he can have a little bit here and there now without a huge problem. I didn't give it to him until he was much older because I knew it affected him. I wonder if the study took that sort of thing into account. It would appear that starting late caused his intolerance, when really we started late BECAUSE he had an intolerance.
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Most allergies are totally 100% genetic, already there, not much you can do about it. Some are indeed It kind of bugs me that so much of the hand-wringing about when to start solids makes it seem like allergies are totally dependent on that, when in fact it's probably only pertinent in a minority of cases. It all just turns into another "no matter what happened, it's somehow the mother's fault" thing, which annoys me to no end.
You are right that the age to start peanuts and other risky allergens moves around. For a few years, it was suggested that people wait until at least 1, and many pediatricians said as late as age 3. However, this was based on a theory of immunology that turned out to be quite wrong. A friend who studies allergies said that the advice to put off allergens is basically a public health fiasco, because the research that's come out in the past few years shows that it probably made the problem worse. I probably wouldn't say "fiasco" (she's kind of an enthusiastic person, plus we were at a party), but the recent studies are pretty conclusive that starting nuts/eggs/etc when you start regular foods (between 4 and 7 months) is a better idea.
I dunno, I find all this really fascinating and I try to read everything I can on the subject. Both my husband and I have some weird and fairly severe allergies, and luckily it seems that both kids have escaped that. As I said, most of it is just genetic and luck of the draw (when people talk about genetics, it's important to remember that genetic doesn't necessarily mean hereditary... though obviously often it does) but I still worked overtime to figure out what were facts and what weren't when we started solids.
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