Can early feeding of allergenic foods overcome them? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Feeding very young children peanut products can assure that they don’t develop an allergy to peanut. Can this strategy be expanded to allergies to foods like milk, meat, or egg? Johns Hopkins allergy expert Robert Wood comments.

Wood:  There’s an enormous market that's grown around this early introduction idea, so yes, you can buy lots of products that contain the major allergens in a form that babies can eat them. The same that's been shown for peanut is pretty clear for other allergens that early introduction could be protective. On the other hand even though the guidelines for preventing peanut allergy are now 8 years old there's been absolutely no reduction in peanut allergy. Implementing this information out into practice has not occurred.  :29

Wood says while it isn’t known precisely why the guidelines for feeding peanut have not reduced prevalence of this allergy, many believe it’s because parents don’t feed enough peanut over a long enough period of time to desensitize kids. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.