shape the course of scientific history. But that’s what happened when Gideon Lack, a paediatric allergist at King’s College London, visited the Sea of Galilee in Israel with some friends in 2003. As the group relaxed on the front porch, Lack remembers, his friends fed their six-monthold baby with peanut-butter-flavoured puffs of corn called Bamba, a popular snack in Israel. Many allergists at the time might have recoiled in horror. The prevailing wisdom was that parents should avoid feeding their babies foods containing peanut for the first year of life to prevent them from developing an allergy. But Lack had already come to suspect that the prevailing wisdom was incorrect — and the lake-shore moment crystallized his suspicions. Just before his visit, Lack had given a lecture in Tel Aviv. He asked the audience of Israeli doctors how many of them had seen a case of peanut allergy in the past year. “Only two or three of the entire audience put up their hand,” Lack says. “In the UK, every paediatrician or GP would have put up their hand.” Israel didn’t have peanut-allergy-prevention guidelines because peanut allergy wasn’t a big problem there. At the lake, Lack recalls his friends explaining that everybody they knew gave these peanut snacks to babies. His hunch was that the solution to the rapid rise in peanut allergy in the United Kingdom and many other countries might be for babies to eat peanutcontaining foods, rather than avoid them. “That’s really when I decided there was mileage in this hypothesis and we ought to pursue it.” In the following years, Lack and his collaborators helped to overturn the conventional wisdom about food-allergy prevention. Today’s guidelines no longer recommend dietary avoidance. And there is growing evidence that introducing certain allergenic foods such as peanut and egg to a baby’s diet early, at around four to six months of age, can help to prevent allergies to those foods. How a peanut snack triggered a fresh approach to allergy prevention

中文翻译：

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花生零食引发了新的过敏预防方法

塑造科学史的进程。但这就是 2003 年伦敦国王学院儿科过敏症专家 Gideon Lack 和一些朋友访问以色列加利利海时发生的事情。当这群人在前廊放松时，Lack 记得，他的朋友们给他们 6 个月大的婴儿喂食花生酱味的玉米泡芙，称为班巴（Bamba），是以色列的一种流行小吃。当时的许多过敏症患者可能会惊恐地退缩。普遍的观点是，父母应避免在婴儿出生后的第一年给婴儿喂食含有花生的食物，以防止他们过敏。但拉克已经开始怀疑盛行的智慧是错误的——湖岸时刻让他的怀疑更加清晰。就在他访问之前，拉克在特拉维夫做了一次演讲。他问以色列医生的听众，他们中有多少人在过去一年中看到过花生过敏病例。“只有两三个观众举手，”拉克说。“在英国，每个儿科医生或全科医生都会举手。” 以色列没有花生过敏预防指南，因为花生过敏在那里不是大问题。在湖边，Lack 回忆起他的朋友解释说，他们认识的每个人都给婴儿提供这些花生零食。他的预感是，英国和许多其他国家/地区对花生过敏症迅速增加的解决方案可能是让婴儿吃含花生的食物，而不是避免食用。“那真的是我决定在这个假设中存在里程的时候，我们应该追求它。” 在接下来的几年里，拉克和他的合作者帮助推翻了关于食物过敏预防的传统观点。今天的指南不再推荐饮食避免。越来越多的证据表明，在婴儿大约 4 到 6 个月大的时候，尽早在婴儿的饮食中加入某些过敏食物，例如花生和鸡蛋，可以帮助预防对这些食物的过敏。花生零食如何引发预防过敏的新方法