 Does introducing young children to peanut-containing products increase or decrease their chances of developing a peanut allergy? For years, parents have been told to keep their kids away from peanut products if there's a good chance of them developing an allergy, yet a British study is turning this conventional wisdom on its head. The Learning Early About Peanut Allergy trial, or LEAP for short, set out to measure the effect of exposing high-risk children to foods containing peanuts early on in their lives. They started out with 640 kids between the ages of 4 and 11 months who suffer from an egg allergy or severe eczema or both. They did this because these existing conditions suggest there's a reasonable chance of developing a peanut allergy as a child. Each of these children were then given a skin-prick test to see if their bodies were already primed to react to peanuts. 98 of the kids ended up in this especially high-risk group. Within each of the two groups, those that were highly likely to develop an allergy and those that were just somewhat likely, researchers randomly assigned children to either avoid peanut-containing products or to be fed them regularly each week, and this went on until the children were 5 years old. The results were quite startling. Take those children that were considered only somewhat likely to develop a peanut allergy. Out of those that ate peanut products every week, two out of every 100 of them ended up developing an allergy. That may sound high, but compare it to those that weren't exposed to peanut products. In this group, 14 kids out of every 100 developed an allergy. In other words, kids that were not exposed to peanuts were seven times more likely to develop a peanut allergy than those that were. This was in the lower-risk group of kids. In the higher-risk group, similar results were seen. Here the overall percentage of kids with an allergy at 5 years old was higher as you'd expect, but even in this group, if your child was not exposed to peanut products, they were three times more likely to develop an allergy than if they were. Following on from this research, the LEAP team have just published a follow-up study where the original participants avoided peanut-containing food for 12 months after the original trial. That included those that originally were exposed to peanut-containing products and those that weren't. They were then retested for peanut allergy. With results, there was no indication that avoiding peanut-containing products increased the chances of an allergy subsequently developing, suggesting that early childhood exposure may provide a degree of longer-term protection. There's still a lot we don't know about what causes peanut allergy, and it's important to note that even with early exposure, your child may still develop a serious allergic response. Yet the results from the LEAP study suggest that avoiding peanut products altogether at an early age can actually increase the risk of later allergy. Because of this, a number of professional organisations are now recommending that parents introduce peanut-containing products to their kids early on, with the proviso of course that some children will still develop an allergy, and professional advice should be sought wherever there's a high chance of this occurring. You can find more information on the LEAP study in the blurb below, and do check out the Reactions channel on YouTube who we're partnering with this week for more about peanut allergies and a whole bunch of other cool stuff.