preventing food allergies

sherpa

Can you prevent your baby from having allergies during pregnancy? My 2 yo had so many when he was born and is down to 4 or 5 things now but I would like to avoid months of trial and error again because it was freaking miserable.

BritanyV

I don't know if there is a way to prevent food allergies or not.  My ds has several food allergies, pecans, peanuts (probably all nuts but those are the ones we know for sure), chocolate and eggs.   

I was allergic to eggs as a child so that didn't surprise me but the nuts really surprised us, as we have no one in our family with nut allergies.

Personally, I am trying to stay away from nuts during my pregnancy and will not eat nuts while breastfeeding.   My ds had a weird reaction to breastmilk after I had eaten a Reese's peanut butter cup.   I asked the pedi about it and they said "no, it can't be a reaction to the peanuts."  Well, YES it was!   So be careful what you eat if you breastfeed.  

I have also learned that vaccine makers are allowed to use peanut oil in their vaccines without declaring the allergen on the vaccine label/ingredients.   So you don't know which vaccines has the peanut oil and which doesn't.   From what I have read, when you inject a person with a vaccine and if it has a food based ingredient in it, that while the body is creating antibodies for whatever the vaccines is for, it is also recognizing the food based particles as an invader and can cause a food allergy from this.  

 I don't know if it is because my son came across a peanut oil vaccine or if it is because I had eaten peanuts while breastfeeding and it happened to be after a time he had gotten a vaccine, which in theory could cause the same thing to happen because it is a high allergen food.