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Food

How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Peanut

Now that we've established that hiding peanut products from kids is just making the allergy epidemic worse, can we go back to worshipping fluffernutters?

Peanuts are many things: a popular snack for circus elephants, ubiquitous airplane cuisine, and of course, the consummate partner to jellies of all varieties (but most sublimely, grape). They are also an important part of American culinary history—America created the fluffernutter during World War I, for god's sake. However, they have also, over the past two decades, garnered an increasingly negative reputation as a harmful, and sometimes fatal, allergen due to the risk of anaphylactic shock.

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Some reports indicate that peanut allergy among children in the United States has more than quadrupled in the past 20 years. Peanut hysteria has swept the nation, with some schools banning the maligned legume as far back as 1998. However, that course of action has largely proved troublesome and ineffective—and the root of the problem, causing this uptick in allergies, has remained largely a mystery.

Fortunately, due to a handful of recent studies aimed at understanding nut allergies, the lowly peanut may be working its way back into the good graces of society, though it will probably remain off many school lunch menus for the foreseeable future. Two publications in The New England Journal of Medicine from this year present compelling evidence for the prevention of peanut allergy.

READ MORE: Why Peanuts Are Being Taken Out of Baseball Stadiums

The first study follows groundbreaking research from last year, which concluded that children exposed early and consistently to peanuts were significantly less likely to develop allergy symptoms. The more recent study builds on that, looking at potential long-term tolerance to peanuts, even if the child stops eating them for up to a year. With over 500 participants, the study compared two groups of children: a "peanut-consumption group," who ate peanuts, and a "peanut-avoidance group," who did not. Speaking with MUNCHIES, James R. Baker Jr., the CEO of FARE (Food Allergy Research & Education), said, "The take-home message from that is exposure early in life seems to induce a tolerant [state] that prevents the development of food allergy."

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Photo via Flickr user Kimberly Vardeman

Love will no longer tear us apart, fluffernutters. Photo via Flickr user Kimberly Vardeman

The statistics certainly reflect that: even after a year abstaining from peanuts, the children in the "peanut-consumption group had a prevalence of peanut allergy that was 74 percent lower" than those in the avoidance group.

Similarly, another study took on the World Health Organization's recommendation that babies should only be breast-fed for the first six months of life. Its results show that that the introduction of peanuts and eggs in infants less than six months of age "was associated with a significantly lower prevalence of these respective food allergies."

Both cases work against the narrative that allergens should be avoided by infants—which echoes Baker's own sentiments: "One of the responses was the thought that what if we stopped feeding these foods to kids, and they just breast-feed and avoided all foods until they are a year of age, [it] will prevent the development of allergy," says Baker, "and in fact that sort of became a dogma."

"The data now is certainly that there is no problem feeding children early on, and in fact, feeding them the food may suppress allergy, but certainly doesn't increase the incidence of allergy." However, he does note that some children are simply born with food allergies "out of the womb," and that safety in all cases with infants is of the utmost importance.

RECIPE: Salted Peanut Butter Cookies

As for the future of America's favorite nut, Patrick Archer, President of the American Peanut Council, tells MUNCHIES that his organization is, "cautiously optimistic… as a result of this important work." Meanwhile, in a post from 2015, the National Peanut Board says that "peanut butter sales figures are at an all-time high."

So, come on, America—stop being so afraid. The peanut is our friend, and if anyone says otherwise, they will have to pry this fluffernutter from my cold, dead hands.