Encouraging news has emerged for parents dealing with food allergies: a recent study indicates a decline in peanut allergies among children, attributed to early exposure to allergens.

Conducted by researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), the study highlights the success of national recommendations advocating for the early introduction of allergenic foods. These findings were shared on October 20, 2025, in the Pediatrics journal, associated with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

David Hill, MD, PhD, a leading physician in CHOP’s Division of Allergy and Immunology and the study’s senior author, remarked to Parents.com, “This study offers the first real-world evidence that the national guidelines promoting early introduction of peanuts and other allergenic foods are effectively reducing the incidence of these allergies.”

For many years, the conventional advice to parents was to postpone the introduction of peanuts to young children. This perspective has undergone a significant shift.

Family physician Beth Oller, MD, explained to Parents, “Before the year 2000, it was commonly advised to delay peanut introduction until children were 2 to 3 years old. However, in 2008, the AAP revised their stance, suggesting that introducing peanuts between 4 to 6 months could actually prevent the development of peanut allergies.”

A pivotal moment came in 2015, when the Learning Early About Peanut Allergy (LEAP) study revealed that infants with severe eczema or egg allergies who were exposed to peanut products between 4 and 11 months had an 81% lower risk of developing peanut allergies. The findings transformed allergy guidelines worldwide.

Today, pediatricians recommend that parents introduce major allergens, such as egg and peanut, as early as 4 to 6 months, provided the child has no prior allergic reaction history.

The CHOP team analyzed electronic records from more than 120,000 children seen in pediatric offices across several U.S. states, comparing allergy rates before and after the 2015 and 2017 recommendations took effect.

“We saw a steady and statistically significant drop in new peanut and other food allergy diagnoses after those recommendations went into effect,” Dr. Hill says.

The results are striking. Researchers found a 27% drop in new peanut allergy diagnoses among children ages 0–3 since the 2015 guideline changes, and a 40% drop since the 2017 update.

Peanut allergies, once the most common childhood food allergy, have now been surpassed by egg allergies, according to the data.

“For years we’ve witnessed the power of how training the immune system toward food proteins can turn off the allergic response,” says Inderpal Randhawa, MD, a board-certified allergist, pediatrician, and founder and CEO of the Food Allergy Institute in Long Beach, California. “The study confirms what our clinical outcomes have shown: the immune system is teachable. If you present food antigens early, consistently, and safely, the immune system learns tolerance instead of launching a defensive allergic response.”