Parents will do anything in their power to make sure their children are healthy and free from allergies. Unfortunately, parents were led astray by the American Academy of Pediatrics after it released guidelines in 2000 saying, “Mothers should eliminate peanuts and tree nuts and consider eliminating eggs, cow’s milk, fish, and perhaps other foods from their diets while nursing.” Luckily, over 15 of years of new evidence has since changed that recommendation.

Avoiding peanuts to prevent a peanut allergy is counterintuitive, according to Dr. Aaron Carroll, host of Healthcare Triage, who says that “research in the last few years has consistently shown that this may be the wrong approach. We may be doing more harm than good with all this avoidance. We might want to consider doing the opposite.”

Today, parents looking to prevent peanut allergies among their children are advised to introduce nuts to their diet earlier rather than later. In fact, both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology joined together to release a consensus that advises parents to begin introducing peanuts to their children’s diets between 4 and 11 months old. Highly allergenic foods should also be introduced after complementary foods have been tolerated.

Peanut allergies are the most common food allergy, and the rates of children impacted by them more than tripled between 1997 and 2008. Researchers from King’s College London recently decided to take a closer look at peanut allergies by looking at two different groups of children: Those in Israel, where there are lower rates of peanut allergies, and Jewish kids living in the United Kingdom. Although Jewish children in the UK share ancestry with Israeli children, they did not have a similarly low risk of peanut allergies because they were not exposed to peanuts at an early age, the researchers found.