What’s “common sense” is drastically different depending on whether you assume a complex system is static or adaptive.

You can expose a six month old to honey as well but their complex and adaptive digestion system still isn't going to kill the botulism spores that might be in it.

"I don't know how this bad thing works, better rub it on my gums" is not a good strategy in general.

It's like vaccination ... few spores won't kill the child, and will train its immune systems.

Botulism spores do not "train immune systems". Babies don't have strong enough digestive systems until they're at least six months old to kill the spores.

https://www.cdc.gov/botulism/infant-botulism.html.

And that we should use the real scientific method instead of "common sense" disguised as science.

I have three children, and they had three different pediatricians when they were babies. The three pediatricians had a different incompatible list of food the children must eat when they had between 6 and 12 month old. And if you go to the web, there is even more disinformation and snake oil.

It was funny to compare the list of food of the pediatricians of my children with the list of foods of the pediatricians of the children of my friends. Also, sometime people get too attached to this recommendations and make a big mess if the children of a friend does not follow the rules of their own children.

(I think the only food in the intersection was honey, because it's too difficult to pasteurize. It make sense, but I'm not sure how thoughtfully it was tested.)

> common sense was wrong

I don't think that's been proven conclusively.

This is literally an article with proof that the previous guidance we was wrong and actively harmful to the children that were subjected to it.

This is literally an article that is pointing to a research paper that doesn't definitely conclude anything.

I'm not sure which article or paper you are reading?

The paper the article references says:

> A 77% reduction in peanut allergy was estimated when peanut was introduced to the diet of all infants, at 4 months with eczema, and at 6 months without eczema. The estimated reduction in peanut allergy diminished with every month of delayed introduction. If introduction was delayed to 12 months, peanut allergy was only reduced by 33%.

Edit: While I'm not sure what your standards are for "conclusive", the author's of the paper have drawn pretty strong conclusions and any doubts I see are around precisely how much the effectiveness of peanut introduction drops off with infant age, not about wether such a drop occurs.

Based on a population of jewish children in england vs. a population of jewish children in Israel, literally a repeat population from the first study 8 years ago.

The paper in question also states: "Moreover, it should be noted that since the change in Australian guidelines in 2016, consumption of peanut during the first year of life increased from 28.4% before the guidelines (2007-11) to 88.6% after the implementation of the guidelines (2016-18). Despite this change, a recent publication has shown no decline in the observed prevalence of peanut allergy in Australia in 2020, which remained stable at 3.1%."

It's been tried in a large population with literally zero effect.

No, it was based on what we now phrase as “an abundance of caution.”

One of these days I will draw a one panel image that demonstrates the fallacy of this thinking.

No, this was done from fear. My generation were given peanut butter early, and it was tested in a small amount to see if there was a problem first. This was common sense for a long long time, and it seemed to work fine.

A generation later parents were told to avoid it until age 3 or 4 for no real reason, and it created a ton of peanut allergies in those kids. They were scared of their kid having a peanut allergy. This was fear, counter to the common sense they themselves were raised with.

Peanut allergies were exceptionally rare decades ago when nobody worried about peanut allergies in the first place. In the 20th century everybody in America sent their kids to school with peanut butter sandwiches and virtually everybody was fine. I didn't even know people could be allergic to peanuts until I was an adult. Now schools ban peanut butter sandwiches and it seems like every other family claims their child is allergic to peanuts. Common sense says that we need to give kids more peanut butter sandwiches, like we used to, and it would stop being a problem.

Also, we should stop testing for allergies unless there is a good reason to test a specific person for a specific allergy (e.g. they already had a bad reaction to something, and need to figure out what.) Those allergen tests have many false positives, people that could have gone their whole lives eating peanuts without thinking twice about it will instead spend their whole lives avoiding peanuts because a precautionary allergen test came back sliightly positive and they "don't want to take the risk". More medical testing is not always a good thing.

This history seemed dubious, so I looked up a random 1989 allergy journal: "Peanut allergy is one of the most common food allergies and probably the most common cause of death by food anaphylaxis in the United States."

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Allergy_Proceedings/ecU...

Just because it was the "most common" doesn't mean much. It was still more rare in the past. Food allergies in general were more rare. It also says nothing as to how much it has grown if it is still the most common, eg. maybe it was most common being 20% of total food allergies where as now maybe that number is 50%. IDK just saying on surface this isn't much of a counter-argument.

This could easily be attributed to a lack of diagnosis. Less than 70 years ago it was common for the official cause death to be “natural causes”, which was the default catch-all when the cause couldn’t be attributed to anything else. Not for lack of trying, we just didn’t have the technology and wealth of research and knowledge until fairly recently.

Go read the obituaries in the historic New York Times archives, it’s insane. Infants and children would die and best we could do was shrug it off and say “god works in mysterious ways” or some such bullshit.

The narrative you are presenting is also based on common sense though.

We have observations that populations of kids eating peanuts early have lower allergy rate, but it´s not like we isolated 300 babies and experimented on them for 30 years, we just can´t. Short of other stronger evidence we assume it´s true, but if tomorrow we found that there were other causes specific to the US, independent from peanuts themselves, we´d have the same reaction: we didn´t know so we did our best.

> The narrative you are presenting is also based on common sense though.

Yes that's my point. Common sense was never with the peanut bans. Common sense was with peanut eating the entire time.

> Now schools ban peanut butter sandwiches

My kid's school bans anything that has those warnings about "not produced in a nut free factory". It's insane actually how limiting it is for a family with no allergies like ours.

> Common sense says that we need to give kids more peanut butter sandwiches, like we used to, and it would stop being a problem

Not sure if it was medically wise, but this was my common sense thinking too. Around 3-6 months, I figured we consume enough peanut butter in the house that if he had a severe allergy we'd have known by then (eg. accidental cross contamination). I also figured at this point he could survive the quick trip to the ER if needed. So I gave it to him and closely monitored his condition. First, just put a little on inside of forearm to see if any signs of irritation. Thinking perhaps a mild allergy may show itself this way, also thinking maybe his airway wouldn't swell up as initial symptom as it might with ingestion (would like to avoid that). It went well so shortly after let him eat a little. No problems. We did this similar approach with all of the common allergy stuff, no issues for us, although I don't know if I was fully informed of how allergies work or naively being cavalier with risk or something (I obviously didn't think so).

My daughter developed (non life-threatening) allergies to corn, eggs, and apples, all of which she had been exposed to plenty beforehand, so it's not necessarily that straightforward.

I don't see how it's common sense to avoid certain foods at a young age to avoid allergies later on. Am I missing some obvious connection? If allergies are caused by the immune system not recognizing X, probably the solution is to introduce X earlier.

They had "peanut-free" lunch tables when I was in elementary school, and all I thought was people just need to stop being so sensitive. Even then, guess I was right.

> They had "peanut-free" lunch tables when I was in elementary school, and all I thought was people just need to stop being so sensitive. Even then, guess I was right.

I'm pretty sure that by elementary school some kids have already developed severe peanut allergies. Keeping peanuts away from someone that might go into anaphylactic shock seems the right amount of sensitivity.

Per the article, the time to be "less sensitive" is much earlier when introducing peanuts can reduce their chance of developing an allergy. By elementary school (ages 6-13) it's mostly too late.

Yeah, that's true.

Perhaps the fact that the food could literally be poison for the person eating it? And if this person has no communication skills...

At least when you're 3 and talking you can be more clear about what's going on with your body if there's a problem.

"Why give them any food at all" is a very glib reply to them. I'll let you figure out why people might avoid certain foods and not others, and why people feed small children

So then I'm either underthinking or overthinking this.