Peanut Training Your Baby

With your Southeast Regional Ag News, I am Haylie Shipp. This is the Ag Information Network.

If you have a kid in the school system, you know that there is one ingredient - one word - that can kind of can stop snack time in its track. That is "peanuts," especially if there's in that group of kiddos associated with yours. Lauren Highfill Williams, Director of Communications for the National Peanut Board...

"A lot of people are surprised to know that about 2% of the population has a peanut allergy. A lot of people think it's much more. So it's certainly a very, very serious issue for the folks that have a peanut allergy. This has been an issue that the National Peanut Board has been committed to really since day one and we've invested more than 33 million dollars in food allergy outreach and education."

How cool is this? Lauren told me that some of this research is actually in the prevention of peanut allergies.

"New guidelines came out from the federal government that say introducing peanut foods as early as four to six months can actually prevent the development of a peanut allergy by up to 86% which is really phenomenal that you can take such a simple intervention like feeding thinned peanut butter to a baby within that first year of life to decrease their chances of developing a peanut allergy."

If you're interested in learning more, there is a website for that: www.PreventPeanutAllergies.org