Eczema, Family History and Food Allergy: What Actually Puts Your Baby at Risk?

If your child has eczema as a baby, now it's really, really common to have eczema, but if your child does have eczema and is diagnosed with it, then your child is more at risk of developing food allergies.

And unfortunately, children with severe eczema are like two thirds of babies will go on to develop food allergies from having severe eczema.

So there's many reasons for this.

And we'll go into that in a minute.

But if your child has mild eczema, then they do have around about 25 percent more chance of developing food allergies than not.

the child that doesn't have any eczema at all but the caveat here is that actually that's even more reason for you to introduce them early you know or early on in their weaning journey as possible so when we say introduce common allergy foods early what we really mean is as early in the weaning process as possible so it's not about getting all those top nine allergy foods in before any other food it's like starting weaning and then getting those things in like some really smooth runny peanut butter some scrambled eggs make sure there's some dairy in there like as quickly as possible basically it's because your child's immune system is very pliable and is very open to suggestion so the younger it is the more you can suggest things that would be accepted okay so it's a bit like maturity in a way so if you are telling your child's immune system here have this egg or this peanut and this is okay because we're you know you're giving it at four five six seven months old then it's more likely to accept it.

Whereas if you wait till 12, 13, 14 months old, the immune system has almost become a bit more what it thinks is clued up and might reject those common foods as the enemy and develop a food allergy.

So the younger the child is, the more chance that they will tolerate these foods and not develop food allergies.

So we know that now with the research, it's really, really clear.

So introducing common allergy foods before 12 months comes with a huge amount of research behind it.

And we know now that that is actually starting to bring down food allergy.

We've seen the stats in egg already.

So that's really good.

So if your child has a family history of food allergy, that again does increase the risk slightly of them developing food allergies, but not necessarily the same food.

And it's actually not as much of a risk factor as if they have eczema.

So the research tells us that around one in seven babies with a family history of eczema will develop food allergies.

But it's not necessarily just, you know, if one parent or one grandparent, it's kind of the allergenic load in that family.

So the more common food allergy is in your family, then the more likely that your child will develop food allergies.

But remember, it's more likely that your child won't develop them.

OK, so hold on to that statistic.

And an interesting twist is a family history of hay fever and asthma actually predicts your child's food allergy more than if there was another food allergy in the family.

So figure that one out.