I'm Flora Lichten, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Today in the pod, big news in the food allergy world.

This gives us a little bit of hope that we are making a dent in food allergy.

Some welcome news.

A study in the journal Pediatrics found that peanut allergies in babies and little kids

are on the decline.

And this drop correlates with a guidance change from the National Institute of Allergy

and Infectious Diseases.

In 2017, they started recommending

that we expose children to peanuts early and often. And since that recommendation, the prevalence

of peanut allergies has dropped significantly. And that's a huge shift because for many years,

peanut allergies were on the rise. Here to churn through the findings is Dr. Sharon Shintraja,

a physician specializing in allergy and immunology at the Sean N. Parker Center at Stanford University.

Sharon, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Flora. I'm so excited to be with you today.

So what did the study find exactly? So what the study looked at is the rate of food allergy

prevalence, how many people have food allergies by studying the electronic medical records

before the guidelines were changed and then immediately after the guidelines were changed and then a little bit post that period as well.

And by looking at that, they found that the rates of diagnosing food allergy has dropped after the guidelines were published.

So that's super exciting because the guidelines were based on NIH-funded research, and that's,

you know, very solid data and evidence that if we introduce peanut early in the diet for infants, for babies, that we can actually prevent

the development of peanut allergy. And that was a huge study that led to the guideline changes.

And so what it says is that doctors are doing a good job, families are doing a great job, following those guidelines,

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