Kids Today Won’t Have As Many Food Allergies As Gen Z, But There’s Help For Them, Too

Over the past two decades, food allergies have become a defining part of daily life for many families, shaping what children eat, how parents plan meals, and even how adults navigate restaurants and social gatherings. Once considered relatively rare, food allergies surged, prompting new questions about why, and how to prevent or even reverse them.

“Food allergy has increased in the last two decades for a few reasons,” says Neeta Ogden, MD, a board-certified allergist in New York. One of the most significant drivers, she explains, was well-intentioned medical advice around the turn of the century that turned out to be wrong.

“Around early 2000 doctors recommended that children avoid highly allergenic foods like peanuts and tree nuts until 3-5 years of age,” Ogden says. “Turns out this was the wrong thinking and led food allergy rates to rise dramatically over the next nearly two decades.” That guidance shifted after the landmark 2015 LEAP (Learning Early About Peanut Allergy) study, which showed that early exposure — rather than avoidance — was key to teaching our immune systems to tolerate these foods.

The findings mirrored what researchers had observed abroad. “Part of the rationale for this was that in Israel, where infants are fed a peanut-containing snack called Bamba starting in infancy, the incidence of peanut allergy in children was far lower than in the U.S.,” she says.

“Hygeine Hypothesis is another reason why we may be seeing rising food allergies in this century,” she says, pointing to frequent handwashing, sanitizers, and disinfectants. Reduced exposure to everyday microbes, she explains, may limit how the immune system learns to regulate allergic responses, particularly in highly developed countries.

“Early allergen introduction is the only proven way to reduce the risk of food allergies in children,” says Meenal Lele, founder and CEO of Hanimune Therapeutics, which produces Lil Mixins, the only insurance covered brand for food allergy prevention. She notes that timing and consistency matter.

“Multiple studies have shown that if babies are regularly fed proteins (that means ~2g of each protein every week) such as peanut and cooked egg between the ages of 6 months and one year, they are 80–90% less likely to develop peanut and egg allergies,” Lele says. 

Those recommendations are now widely endorsed, including by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the two major allergy associations: the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology (AAAAI) and the American College of Allergy Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI).

Lele says that while there have not been large studies for other food allergens, including other nuts, sesame or fish, “there is no reason to delay exposure.”

Ogden says families with a history of allergy should plan proactively. “Food allergy is highly genetic — if your child is in a high risk family see a board-certified allergist prenatally or in early infancy to plan how to proceed.”

For older children and adults who already carry a food allergy diagnosis, the picture is more nuanced, but increasingly hopeful. Ogden stresses the importance of accuracy before assuming an allergy is permanent. She says a blood test searches for IgE, the antibody that can lead to allergy, but “we all have IgE to foods,” so precise levels can be misleading without a confirmed history of clinical reaction.

“If your history is unclear and you only have a positive blood test you may want to seek out a food challenge with a board-certified specialist in a highly monitored setting to confirm if you are truly allergic,” she says.

If an allergy is confirmed, treatment options are expanding. “There is FDA-approved oral immunotherapy for peanut allergic patients that doesn’t cure but prevents the risk of death from accidental exposure,” Ogden says. She also points to newer medications: “The injectable drug Omalizumab, a monoclonal antibody that reduces free IgE levels, has been approved for the treatment of food allergy.”

Lele says immunotherapy has a long track record of success beyond food. “Immunotherapy is a practice that has been used for more than 100 years to desensitize people to different allergies,” she says, pointing to pollen and cats as example targets of more familiar allergy shots. “Some people become so desensitized that they are effectively no longer allergic.”

More recently, studies have shown promise for food allergies, as well. But much like allergy shots, the process requires patience, as “immunotherapy takes 3-5 years to ‘stick’,” Lele says.

“Instead of receiving shots, patients are responding to orally ingested proteins,” she says. “Some patients become significantly less allergic, while others become effectively non-allergic. In order to make early allergen introduction easy, Lil Mixins created powdered whole foods that any parent can use with confidence to regularly feed their baby common allergens.”

Her company also produces Top9Proteins for use by doctors, isolating the proteins in amounts as small as 1/10,000th of an egg to help clinicians give patients exactly as much as they can tolerate before slowly increasing their exposure.

While food allergies remain serious and complex, experts say learning how the immune system learns and adapts has led to new tools for protecting children early and expanding options for “the food allergy generation” later in life.