Pregnant mothers can eat peanuts, the FSA has advised. The Food Standards Agency (FSA) last night recommended that the Government drop its long-standing warning to mothers to avoid the nuts. 

A review by the Committee on Toxicity (COT) found no evidence that children whose mothers ate peanuts during or in the years immediately after pregnancy were at greater risk of nut allergies. 

The FSA’s new guidelines, which will be submitted to the Department of Health, reject existing advice that parents with a family history of food allergies, eczema, hay fever or asthma should not eat the nuts, or give them to their young children. 

“For high-risk groups there is no need for women who are pregnant or breastfeeding or who have children aged under three to change their diets,” the FSA said. 

“Where there is a family history of allergy, parents might want to discuss their individual case with their GP or health professional if they are concerned.” 

The statement added: “The new review considered by the COT does not suggest that this current advice is harmful. However, the FSA Board has agreed that the balance of evidence now available does not support continuing to follow this current advice.” 

The revised advice following warnings this week that fears over nut allergies are creating mass “hysteria” and causing schools to overreact to the dangers. Prof Nicholas Christakis of the Harvard Medical School said that draconian measure imposed to prevent children coming into contact with nuts were out of all proportion to the risks. “The issue is not whether nut allergies exist or whether they can occasionally be serious… The issue is what accounts for the extreme responses to nut allergies and what to do about the responses and the allergies themselves,” he said. 

Last year the House of Lords science and technology committee recommended that the official advice be changed, after research from the University of Portsmouth showed that many first-time mothers were needlessly avoiding peanuts even when there was no family history of allergies. 

Around one in 200 of the population suffers from peanut allergy, according to the British Nutrition Foundation. The most common symptoms are facial tingling and swelling, nausea and tightness of the throat, although it can be fatal in a minority of extreme cases. The latest figures show 79 people died from allergic reactions in 2004, but data is not held in Britain on how many people died specifically from nut allergies. 

A Department of Health spokesman said: “We are awaiting the FSA Board’s formal advice before making a decision about revising the current policy.” 

This is the second time this year that official advice on what women can eat and drink during pregnancy has been rewritten. In April mothers-to-be were told they should not drink any alcohol at all, reversing previous advice that one-and-a-half units a day was safe. 

(Telegraph.co.uk, December 10, 2008) 

Read the article here 

Comments(0)

Here’s a health tip in a nutshell: Eating a handful of nuts a day for a year — along with a Mediterranean diet rich in fruit, vegetables and fish — may help undo a collection of risk factors for heart disease.

Spanish researchers found that adding nuts worked better than boosting the olive oil in a typical Mediterranean diet. Both regimens cut the heart risks known as metabolic syndrome in more people than a low-fat diet did.

“What’s most surprising is they found substantial metabolic benefits in the absence of calorie reduction or weight loss,” said Dr. JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

In the study, appearing Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the people who improved most were told to eat about three whole walnuts, seven or eight whole hazelnuts and seven or eight whole almonds. They didn’t lose weight, on average, but more of them succeeded in reducing belly fat and improving their cholesterol and blood pressure.

Manson, who wasn’t involved in the study, cautioned that adding nuts to a Western diet — one packed with too many calories and junk food — could lead to weight gain and more health risks. “But using nuts to replace a snack of chips or crackers is a very favorable change to make in your diet,” Manson said.

The American Heart Association says 50 million Americans have metabolic syndrome, a combination of health risks, such as high blood pressure and abdominal obesity. Finding a way to reverse it with a diet people find easy and satisfying would mean huge health improvements for many Americans, Manson said.

Nuts help people feel full while also increasing the body’s ability to burn fat, said lead author Dr. Jordi Salas-Salvado of the University of Rovira i Virgili in Reus, Spain.

“Nuts could have an effect on metabolic syndrome by multiple mechanisms,” Salas-Salvado said in an e-mail. Nuts are rich in anti-inflammatory substances, such as fiber, and antioxidants, such as vitamin E. They are high in unsaturated fat, a healthier fat known to lower blood triglycerides and increase good cholesterol.

More than 1,200 Spaniards, ranging in age from 55 to 80, were randomly assigned to follow one of three diets. They were followed for a year. The participants had no prior history of heart disease, but some had risk factors including Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and abdominal obesity.

At the start, 751 people had metabolic syndrome, about 61 percent, distributed evenly among the three groups.

Metabolic syndrome was defined as having three or more of the following conditions: abdominal obesity, high triglycerides, low levels of good cholesterol (HDL), high blood sugar and high blood pressure.

The low-fat group was given basic advice about reducing all fat in their diets. Another group ate a Mediterranean diet with extra nuts. The third group ate a Mediterranean diet and was told to make sure they ate more than four tablespoons of olive oil a day.

Dietitians advised the two groups on the Mediterranean diet to use olive oil for cooking; increase fruit, vegetable and fish consumption; eat white meat instead of beef or processed meat; and prepare homemade tomato sauce with garlic, onions and herbs. Drinkers were told to stick with red wine.

After one year, all three groups had fewer people with metabolic syndrome, but the group eating nuts led the improvement, now with 52 percent having those heart risk factors. In the olive oil group, 57 percent had the syndrome. In the low-fat group, there was very little difference after a year in the percentage of people with the syndrome.

The nut-rich diet didn’t do much to improve high blood sugar, but the large number of people with Type 2 diabetes — about 46 percent of participants — could be the reason, Salas-Salvado said. It’s difficult to get diabetics’ blood sugar down with lifestyle changes alone, he said.

To verify that study volunteers ate their nuts, researchers gave some of them a blood test for alpha-linolenic acid found in walnuts.

The study was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Health and the government of Valencia, Spain.

Salas-Salvado and another co-author disclosed in the publication that they are unpaid advisers to nut industry groups. Salas-Salvado said all of their research “has been conducted under standard ethical and scientific rules” and that peer-review journal editors determined the study results were not influenced by food industry ties.

(Associated Press, December 10, 2008)
Read the article here

See also:
(USA Today, December 8, 2008)
Read the article here

Comments(0)

By Karen Bridgers

Comments(0)

Fears over the dangers of peanut allergy, a potentially deadly allergy for certain people, are becoming sensationalist and hysterical, according to a Harvard professor. A level-headed approach is needed before the situation spirals out of control, wrote Professor Nicolas Christakis from Harvard Medical School in the British Medical Journal. 

The food industry is already bound by certain regulations, depending on the country, to highlight possible allergens in a food product, such as the EU’s Labelling Directive 2000/13/EC. But Prof Christakis said that such an approach, however well intentioned, may actually “fan the flames, since they signal to parents that nuts are a clear and present danger. 

“This encourages more parents to worry, which fuels the epidemic. It also encourages more parents to have their children tested, thus detecting mild and meaningless ‘allergies’ to nuts. And this encourages still more avoidance of nuts, leading to still more sensitisation. “The cycle of increasing anxiety, draconian measures, and an increasing prevalence of nut allergies must be broken,” he said. 

Peanut allergies are rising in humans, with an estimated 2.5 million people in Europe and the US now vulnerable to the food allergy. There is no current cure for food allergy and vigilance by an allergic individual is the only way to prevent a reaction but a peanut allergy can be so severe that only very tiny amounts can be enough to trigger a response. 

Current recommendations in many countries, such as the UK and the US, for would-be mothers are to avoid peanuts during pregnancy, breastfeeding, and infancy. However, a recent study comparing incidence of peanut allergy in Jewish children in the UK and Israel (where no such recommendations exist) showed that children in the UK were 10 times more likely to suffer from peanut allergy than their Israeli counterparts. 

Findings in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology showed that 69 per cent of Israeli children were consuming peanut, while only ten per cent of the children in the UK were eating peanuts. Mass hysteria? 

“Measures to control nuts are instead making things worse in a cycle of over-reaction and increasing sensitisation,” said Prof Christakis. One example cited in the BMJ article involved the evacuation and decontamination pf a school bus in the US following discovery of one peanut on the floor. The school bus was full of ten year olds, who could arguably have been told simply to not eat food off the floor. 

The “gross over-reaction to the magnitude of the threat” is very similar to mass psychogenic illness (MPI), said Prof Christakis, previously known as epidemic hysteria. Outbreaks of MPI involve healthy people in a flow of anxiety, most often triggered by a fear of contamination, he said. Being around individuals who are anxious heightens others’ anxiety. 

Lightning bolts are equally as dangerous In attempt to add perspective, the Harvard professor notes that 150 people die each year from food allergies in the US. On the other hand, 100 people die from lightening strikes, 45,000 die in automobile accidents, and 10,000 are hospitalised for traumatic brain injury from playing sport. 

“We do not see calls to end athletics,” he said. “There are no doubt thousands of parents who rid their cupboards of peanut butter but not of guns,” he added. “And more children assuredly die walking or being driven to school each year than die from nut allergies.” 

Source: British Medical Journal  (FoodNavigator-USA.com, December 10, 2008)  Read the article here  

Comments(0)

Comments(0)