Let them go nuts and eat nuts. Let them crawl in the sand, and don't fret if they get soiled by dog poo. Babies and toddlers need to be exposed to "trigger" foods like peanuts and random pickings from the great outdoors to avoid developing allergies later in life. The steep rise in allergies in South Africa and globally seems to be linked to decades of the wrong advice - that young children should be protected from contact with potential allergens.Allergy experts are now overturning these recommendations, which might come as a shock to overprotective parents who have been following the conventional rules."We need to bombard babies under one year old with bugs and allergenic foods to switch off their allergies," said Dr Adrian Morris, director of the Cape Town Allergy Clinic."We have created an epidemic of peanut allergies after 20 to 30 years of telling pregnant and breastfeeding women not to eat nuts or give them to their kids. In fact the opposite is true."nbsp;Excessive bathing of infants is another prime suspect in the triggering of allergies, linked to an increase in eczema among toddlers.Even a baby's first exposure to life outside the womb counts - those delivered by natural birth benefit from contact with bacteria in the birth canal. Caesarean babies are more prone to allergies, said Morris.To switch on a protective immune response, babies need to be exposed to allergens in the first year: for example, a dab of peanut butter on a dummy. Traces or small amounts of allergens absorbed through the air or skin are not enough and can cause sensitisation.Professor Mike Levin, based at the Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital in Cape Town, said sensitivity testing should be supported by scientific food challenges before an item was eliminated from a diet.Banning a food when a child tested sensitive to the allergen was a common mistake. This could turn a sensitivity into a full-blown allergy, he warned.story_article_left1The hospital treated about 150 food allergy patients in 2008; four years later, it treated nearly 800. The number of patients treated for life-threatening anaphylactic shock more than quadrupled, from 40 to 170, over this period.Preliminary results of a study on the occurrence of allergies among toddlers aged between 12 months and three years in Cape Town showed that the most common allergies were to eggs (1.8%), followed by peanut butter (1.2%) and cow's milk and fish (0.2%), Levin said.A major study in the UK demonstrated that babies at high risk of developing an allergy to peanuts, and who ate peanut snacks from four months to 11 months old, were about 80% less likely to develop this allergy by the age of five.The belief that young children should avoid peanuts appeared to be incorrect and may have contributed in part to the rise in allergy to the nuts, said Professor Gideon Lack of Kings College, London, who led the study.The benefits of letting young kids experiment and explore, rather than being cocooned, extend beyond food.Parents who are obsessed with keeping a sterile home are not doing their kids a favour because they need to come into contact with bugs. Using anti-bacterial soaps and detergents can rebound.When Germany was reunified, children from the east had fewer allergies than those in the west. When standards of living caught up in the east, so did allergy rates.City-slicker kids without pets are more likely to develop allergies than those growing up on a farm. Country kids also have lower rates of asthma.Environmental factors are only one of the triggers for allergies; genes play a role too. The children of parents who suffer from eczema, asthma, hay fever and food allergies are more prone to problems.Many diet specialists are now revising their advice that babies should avoid dairy, nuts and eggs, and saying they should in fact be exposed to these foods as early as possible.No wonder parents get confused. Maybe it's time to stuff the parenting manuals under the bed and get out into the big, wide, grimy world with their kids...