What will happen to all the children whose..

[Beetrootccio]

Parents were told

3 months is the age to start weaning

or in my case 4 months for ds's and 5 months for dd?

Are they all doomed????

tbh, i weaned v early on the advice of hv, ds is fine, no allergies, never gets ill blah blah blah. my cousin weaned her ds at 6m hes v fussy, has asthma and eczema and is a v sickly child. research can be flawed, we are told something new every week, red meats bad for you, red meats good for you. dont eat dairy, you need more calcium, dont drink at all, drinkers live longer! how are we supposed to trust the people who set these guidelines when the goalposts keep moving?

my brother was weaned at 4 months. his colon got blocked, he got very severe peritonitis and had to have a chunk of it cut out. the surgeon was very pleased - he had a 30% chance of survival. they think this was a direct cause of his autism. he has had problems ever since.

i weaned my dd at 6 months needless to say.

ds and dd were both weaned at 3 months. ds is 15 and no problems and dd is 11 and no problems

thats awful whiffywarthog. and in that case i totally understand. i wish id waited to wean but not necessarily til 6m, imho tho, it a simillar thing to eating nuts while pg. if there is a genetic tendancy towards a problem then follow all the guidelines to the letter, if not.... theres nothing wrong with taking findings with a pinch of salt!

excuse the pun

I'd've thought it would be pretty much impossible to say what the cause for allergies is. Certainly is at the moment re eczema and asthma and teh few allergies I have some second hand experience of.

exactly, i dont see how its possible to place the blame for allergies etc solely at the feet of mums who wean early
here are some statistics and here is a gov doc stating that allergies and intolerances have risen over the last few years. maybe thats coz of later weaning... maybe not but how will we know for certain?

but of course we do feel guilty, even though we don't know for sure. I think DS was weaned between 3 & 4 mths. I had severe sickness all through pregnancy but had a craving for cashew nuts .

DS has nut allergies, asthma, eczema and hayfever. Even though allergies run in DH's family, I think it may have been my fault

I don't see and have never seen anyone 'blaming mothers' for weaning early. The problem is that HVs give such bad, out of date advice. Any anger should be directed towards that profession and the primary care trusts who employ them (and don't ensure there is protected time for continuing professional development).

Anecdotes about 'it never did me/my child any harm' are all very well, but they tell you zip about the population risk. Just like stories about Uncle Albert who smoked 40 a day and lived to 90 with never a day off sick tell you zip about the link between smoking and lung cancer. (Am not comparing early weaning to smoking, merely illustrating the difference between anecdote and actual medical research.)

The number of people who have an allergy and the number of those that are severe has exploded over the past 30 years. The UK is the most allergic nation in the EU. No-one knows why -there are lots of theories with interesting evidence behind them but nothing conclusive yet. It seems a reasonable assumption that early weaning may have something to do with food allergies but it's unlikely to be the cause of everything thats wrong with the world. Still doesn't make it a good idea to feed a child food it is incapable of digesting properly.

If only HVs bothered to explain the guidelines maybe there wouldn't be all this misunderstanding and myth creation. But then, a lot of them don't seem to understand them themselves -as if a GP hadn't bothered to update themself for decades and hadn't realised inhaled steroids are a good idea for asthmatic patients.

Edam - that might be the case if early weaning was something of a recent phenomenon (i.e. within the last 30 years) but early weaning goes back a very very long time, with all kinds of solids being added to the bottles of very young babies.

When I had a stay in hospital as a young child all of the babies in the baby ward were given mushed up digestives biscuits and milk to eat 3 times a day!

I will be very interested to see whether Tamum actually finds any research to support the later weaning of babies. In particular to see whether trends of allergies and other illnesses have decreased since the guidelines on weaning have changed.

see my link below soapy!

am lissielou

Isn't there some evidence that excessive use of chemicals in the home and over-enthusiastic hygiene bear some responsibility for the rise in allergies?

Also early weaning 40+ years ago would have involved reasonably pure and simple foods, wouldn't it? None of this rice and strawberry and sunshine orange nonsense for 3-month-olds back then.

My brother is 42 and I can remember him being weaned on Farleys rusks (but at what age I don't know)

imho, the key is SENSIBLE weaning. i loathe jars etc (but did use them while out & about)the point is its impossible to know for certain that weaning age does determine allergies/intolerances/digestive probs. surely some people are pre-disposed to have such probs?

I've found this, which looks reasonably well done as far as I can see (though I can't get the actual text, so it's hard to tell), but it seems to be very much dependent on epidemiology. It's entirely about allergies, too- I really can't find a shred of direct evidence that IBD or IBS are affected by weaning, and nothing more than vague hand-waving about coeliac. As Soapbox says, it will be very inreresting to see if rates of these diseases fall over the next few years.

Food allergy and the introduction of solid foods to infants: a consensus
document. Adverse Reactions to Foods Committee, American College of Allergy,
Asthma and Immunology.

Fiocchi A, Assa'ad A, Bahna S; Adverse Reactions to Foods Committee; American
College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology.

American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, Melloni Paediatria,
University of Milan Medical School, Melloni Hospital, Milan, Italy.
[email protected]

OBJECTIVE: To make recommendations based on a critical review of the evidence
for the timing of the introduction of solid foods and its possible role in the
development of food allergy. DATA SOURCES: MEDLINE searches using the following
search algorithm: [weaning AND infant AND allergy]/[food allergy AND
sensitization]/[dietary prevention AND food allergy OR allergens]/[Jan 1980-Feb
2006]. STUDY SELECTION: Using the authors' clinical experience and research
expertise, 52 studies were retrieved that satisfied the following conditions:
English language, journal impact factor above 1 or scientific society, expert,
or institutional publication, and appraisable using the World Health
Organization categories of evidence. RESULTS: Available information suggests
that early introduction can increase the risk of food allergy, that avoidance of
solids can prevent the development of specific food allergies, that some foods
are more allergenic than others, and that some food allergies are more
persistent than others. CONCLUSIONS: Pediatricians and allergists should
cautiously individualize the introduction of solids into the infants' diet. With
assessed risk of allergy, the optimal age for the introduction of selected
supplemental foods should be 6 months, dairy products 12 months, hen's egg 24
months, and peanut, tree nuts, fish, and seafood at least 36 months. For all
infants, complementary feeding can be introduced from the sixth month, and egg,
peanut, tree nuts, fish, and seafood introduction require caution. Foods should
be introduced one at a time in small amounts. Mixed foods containing various
food allergens should not be given unless tolerance to every ingredient has been
assessed.

I am sure I had allergies as a child that just weren't noticed or thought of as an allergy.I was constantly itching my eyes,my skin was always coming up in hives,it was just thought that I was a bit odd,allergies were never mentioned.
SO I think part of the increase is actually just that we know more about allergies and diagnose them more readily.My mother talks about a friend of hers who died as a chil suddenly and mysteriously one day ,no reason ever found.She ponders now that it may have been anaphylaxis.
My two dc's were weaned around 3-4 months .Dd is healthy with no allergies,ds has nut allergy/excema and asthma,generally a very atopic child.
I hope it is something as simple as weaning that will lower the incidence of allergies.

Have only read the OP.

Well how many of us mumsnetters or even our parents have allergies etc as a result of earlier weaning as was done then?

I'm not sure when the 4/6 months weaning advice was introduced, does anyone know?

I'm sure my mum said we were weaned at a younger age (we are now late 30s/early 40s)

I have read a (real, academic) paper which found strongly increased risk of asthma associated with weaning before 15 weeks.
That was in a past life, must have come out about... 5 years ago? I thought that there were a few more like it that came out soon after. Sorry am not going to find it now, but I know it really exists.

And I think (?) I've read other research (the original papers) which found no (nutritional) cause to wean before 6 months. Hence the current guidelines.

The children I know with the worst asthma were not just weaned early but really cut down their milk intake very early, too. But that's only anecdotal...

Most people still don't wait till 6m to wean though, so it's not going to be all that interesting to wait.

Although most only wean early on the advice of HVs so that makes it all right...

I don't think the anecdotal stuff is much use really. Dd2 got severe eczema while still completely bf and now has bad asthma. So what? My anecdotal stuff doesn't prove anything either. I've had enough people implying things to me, though.

There are also research papers linking pollution to asthma; linking our much cleaner environment, lack of dirt to eczema/asthma; linking dust mites, carpets, central heating to eczema/asthma; linking scratching to the onset of eczema; linking a gene to eczema/asthma.

And I have found we cannot live our lives around the latest research papers.