Early exposure to cow's milk may have benefits

Allergy to cow's milk is the most common in childhood. It is for this reason that it is recommended not to give dairy products derived from cow's milk until the babies are at least 12 months old. But nevertheless, A recent study shows that it could be beneficial, at the allergenic level, to offer cow's milk to newborns under 2 weeks.

The study has been carried out at Tel Aviv University, in Israel, and the finding appeared by chance. The team tried to simply show the number of children with allergies and determine how often it appears, in addition to observing how many children were soy intolerant.

13,000 babies were studied and it was observed that 66 were allergic to cow's milk (0.5%), lower than expected, since it is estimated that between 1 and 3% tend to be. However, the striking thing about this study is that they realized that Babies fed cow's milk at 15 days or more were 19 times more at risk of having a milk allergy than those who had been exposed in the first two weeks of life.

Kari Nadeau, of Stanford University, in California, who was not involved in the study, commented:

It is good to know that giving babies small amounts of vaccine milk in the first weeks of life would help prevent the immune system from recognizing milk protein as a foreign substance against which it should react.

However, he adds that more studies are needed to know how to address this finding.

The study authors commented that the results do not discourage breastfeeding, but recommend supplementing it with vaccine milk ahead of time.

The truth is that it is an interesting study, since it shows that offering cow's milk to newborn babies greatly reduces the risk of cow's milk allergy. However, there are some questions about it and some considerations that should be assessed before making any recommendations:

  • A baby who drinks breast milk on demand should not supplement such feeding unless it is really necessary. If so decided, should be offered with a glass or syringe, to avoid possible confusion between the nipple of a bottle and the nipple that could cause breastfeeding to fail.
  • It would be necessary to establish how much cow's milk babies should drink in order for the benefit to occur, since the more cow's milk is offered, the less breast milk they will drink.
  • Allergy risk reduction seems a clear benefit, however it does not appear that the short or long term risks of giving cow's milk proteins to a baby less than two weeks have been assessed (taking into account that the concentration is much higher than in breast milk and that the type of protein is very different).
  • If in the study carried out they found that only 0.5% of children had allergy to cow's milk (and other studies speak of 1 to 3%), it would be necessary to assess the extent to which it is necessary to offer cow's milk to All children (100%) if very few will really suffer from the disease.
  • Finally, we must bear in mind that the fact of Offering cow's milk to newborn babies decreases the risk of allergy, but does not eliminate it. It is possible that, when taking it repeatedly, a baby begins to suffer rashes, vomiting and even other more severe symptoms (I would prefer that my son suffered such symptoms with a year of life to do so with less than two weeks).