They can cause a runny nose or itchy eyes, severe coughing or a tightening of the throat. Whether the symptoms are serious or mild, minor or wild, food allergies are an awful pain. In fact, in a small number of cases, they can be downright deadly.

Responsible for approximately 100 deaths every year, peanut allergies are the most common food allergy in the country. It’s estimated that 3 million kids have varying forms of it, or an estimated 1 in every 26 kids (an 18 percent rise since 1998).

Still, less than 1 percent of the country has a peanut allergy, and while such a small percentage makes it seem unworthy of concern, the breadth in which it affects people’s lives is all-encompassing, and thus, deeply concerning (an estimated 15,000 people go to the hospital every year for peanut allergy symptoms). These people must search every food, read every ingredient, and avoid every nut like it was the plague (Companies that produce one brand of nut typically produce others, making the likelihood that trace amounts of peanuts will be in their can of cashews or tin of almonds all but certain).

Twenty-five percent of kids allergic to peanuts eventually grow out of it, but that leaves 75 percent who never do. If only we had the power of time travel, such a percentage might not be so high.

I say that because a recent body of research suggests exposing children to peanuts at an early age preconditions them to any allergens they might be sensitive to.

Such a finding flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Mothers everywhere have long been told to keep themselves and their infants away from peanuts precisely because an early exposure to them now might cause full-blown allergic reactions later. But after reviewing the diet histories of approximately 11,000 children from the United Kingdom and Israel, the opposite appears to be true.

When comparing what the mothers of these children fed their kids in infancy, they found a significant discrepancy between the two, which seemed to break down according to what country the mom’s originated from. In Israel, for example, about 70 percent of mothers introduced peanuts into their kids’ diets by 9 months of age. But for British moms and their kids, that percentage was far lower – only 10 percent did that.

Researchers made the link when looking at the shear number of people affected by peanut allergies in the UK versus Israel: the rate of peanut allergies were 10 times higher among the Brit chits (old term that means “children”) than the Israeli tykes.

The researchers took other potential factors into consideration – like environment, genetics and common household allergens – ultimately finding that these and other factors had no impact on the likelihood or prevalence of peanut allergies. The findings have since been published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

Despite the “optimistic” findings of the study, according to a statement released by the vice chairperson from the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, & Immunology, she cautioned there needs to be more randomized testing done before renewed recommendations can be made regarding pregnant women’s diets and those of their infant children (the study also found that women who ate peanuts while pregnant were more likely to have children sans peanut allergies).

I would agree, but the inverse relationship between a rise in peanut allergies – particularly in the United States, Australia and Britain – and women avoiding peanuts during pregnancy is a hard one to deny.