Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health.

Today we're turning our attention to allergies.

For decades, conflicting advice on how to prevent allergies from developing has left parents unsure about the best ways to protect our children.

Should you introduce peanut products to newborn or avoid them entirely? has left parents unsure about the best ways to protect our children.

Should you introduce peanut products to your newborn or avoid them entirely?

Many are still unclear.

What is clear, however, is that allergies are on the rise.

I'm joined by groundbreaking researcher Dr. Gideon Lack to help bring clarity to this conversation about allergies.

His pioneering work has challenged long-held beliefs and offers potentially life-saving advice.

He begins by sharing his first light bulb moment.

Well, there were a few light bulb moments.

Unfortunately, the light wasn't quite as bright, or perhaps I was too dim, and it took a while for the penny to drop.

But there were a series of observations that puzzled me.

One goes back very early to when I was training and doing research, and I noticed that the way you made little mice pups allergic to foods such as peanut or egg was by rubbing it very gently in low doses on a braided

skin, suggesting that they became allergic through inflamed skin. In contrast, if you gave peanut or egg or milk to a young

mouse pup, you could never induce allergies in that. And that first exposure protected it

long term. And I remember asking my professors at the time, well, why are we telling babies not

to eat the foods if these foods are protecting mice while we thinking

differently about human babies. When guidelines started changing, parents, mothers were coming to me

and saying, look, I don't understand what's going on. I took all the advice from my doctors.

I avoided peanuts during pregnancy, during breastfeeding. I didn't give it to my little boy or girl,

and at three years of age, they ate peanut butter, developed a severe allergy

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