A Pregnancy Diet Loaded With Eggs and Peanuts Didn’t Prevent Infant Allergies

CATEGORY: FOODS & NUTRIENTS

Could a mother eat her way to an allergy-free baby? Australian researchers put that hopeful idea to a proper test, and the answer came back no. In a randomized trial of 2,137 pregnancies at high allergy risk, 7.8% of babies whose mothers ate an egg-and-peanut-rich diet had a confirmed egg or peanut allergy at age one, against 8.4% with a standard diet, a gap small enough to be chance.¹

Six Eggs and Sixty Peanuts a Week

The trial, named PrEggNut, ran in four Australian cities and appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. Every enrolled woman was carrying a baby with at least two close biological relatives with diagnosed allergic disease, which marked these babies as high risk from the start. A computer sorted the mothers into two groups before anything was known about them; nobody picked a side. One group ate at least six eggs and sixty peanuts a week, from mid-pregnancy through the first four months of breastfeeding. The other held to a standard diet, no more than three eggs and thirty peanuts a week. Around their first birthday, the babies were checked for true food allergy, the kind driven by IgE, the immune antibody behind hives, swelling and anaphylaxis.

The Allergy Wave the Trial Planned For Never Arrived

The researchers built the trial expecting about 16% of these high-risk babies to develop egg or peanut allergy. Roughly half that many did. One likely reason is itself good news: by the time the trial ran, every family was getting current advice to introduce egg and peanut to babies early, which earlier research showed prevents allergy. In the LEAP trial, children who ate peanut from infancy had far less peanut allergy, and the protection held into adolescence.² Against that backdrop, the mother’s own intake added nothing measurable. Even among women who followed their assigned diet closely, the difference stayed within chance, 5.6% versus 6.8%. Eczema rates were similar in both groups. So was safety: serious adverse events touched 3.6% of one group and 3.8% of the other, and the extra eggs and peanuts caused no harm the trial could detect.

Key Takeaways

• Eating at least six eggs and sixty peanuts a week during pregnancy and early breastfeeding didn’t lower infants’ egg or peanut allergy: 7.8% versus 8.4% at age one.
• The result cuts both ways. The trial found no protection, and no sign that a mother’s egg or peanut intake raises her baby’s allergy risk either.
• Feeding egg and peanut to babies themselves, early in life, remains the approach with strong randomized evidence behind it.

References

1. Palmer DJ, Campbell DE, Nanan R, et al. Trial of a Maternal Diet Rich in Eggs and Peanuts to Reduce Infant Allergy. New England Journal of Medicine. 2026;395(11):1090–1099. link
2. Du Toit G, Huffaker MF, Radulovic S, et al. Follow-up to Adolescence after Early Peanut Introduction for Allergy Prevention. NEJM Evidence. 2024;3(6):EVIDoa2300311. link