Food

Peanut Butter Allergies Reduced After Scientists Confirm Proper Introduction

- Adam Clare

cooking prep

Dealing with allergies can range from a minor inconvenience to a life threatening situation. Those on the extreme end clearly need to be more attentive to what they get exposed to, and parents have been told forever to monitor what their kids are exposed to for the same fear of an extreme reaction. As such, parents were instructed to delay the introduction of peanuts in their child’s diet until they were three or four, but thanks to enterprising research we now know that it’s best to introduce peanuts earlier and tiny doses. It’s important that we continue to question assumptions about allergies and the world around us because you never know what could be discovered (or modified).

For decades, doctors had recommended delaying feeding children peanuts and other foods likely to trigger allergies until age three. But in 2015, Gideon Lack at King’s College London published the groundbreaking Learning Early About Peanut Allergy, or LEAP, trial.

Lack and colleagues showed that introducing peanut products in infancy reduced the future risk of developing food allergies by more than 80 per cent. Later analysis showed the protection persisted in about 70 per cent of kids into adolescence.

The study immediately sparked new guidelines urging early introduction of peanuts, and the Canadian Paediatric Society recommends introducing common allergenic foods, including peanuts, to babies between four and six months of age.

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Eat More Veggies to Help the Economy

- Adam Clare

If you still ear meat you may be sick of hearing that cutting out meat is good for your diet, health, and particularly good for the planet. If none of those reasons weren’t enough to convince to give up the flesh then maybe saving money will do it:

  • This 2022 study in Portugal found that vegan consumers spent the least among the groups examined.
  • A 2025 Austrian study found that vegan diets can save up to 41% of shopping costs (225 euros) for a family of four.
  • This 2021 German study found that monthly grocery bills for vegans cost 91 euros less compared to omnivorous diets, or about 11% less.

What’s more, getting people to switch to plant based proteins can make national economies more robust and better performing:

  • This 2023 Nature study found that “a dietary shift away from animal-sourced foods could greatly reduce these ‘hidden’ costs, saving up to $7.3 trillion worth of production-related health burden and ecosystem degradation while curbing carbon emissions.”
  • This 2016 study found that a global shift away from animal products could save “1–31 trillion US dollars, which is equivalent to 0.4–13% of global gross domestic product (GDP) in 2050.”
  • This 2020 FAO report found that vegan diets could avoid $ 1.3 trillion in healthcare-related costs and between $0.8 and $1.3 trillion in climate change emissions mitigation. Bonus, the report found that “a vegan diet could save “13.7 (7.9-19.4) million avoidable deaths globally in 2030.”
  • This 2024 report estimates that the NHS (England’s National Health Service) could save £2.2 billion in medical fees if the British population ate meat-free for weekday lunches.
  • This 2024 report estimates that factory farming costs British taxpayers over £1.2 billion annually, in the form of subsidies, environmental pollution, respiratory illnesses, and lost farming jobs.
  • A 2023 UK preprint estimates that if everyone in the UK adopted a plant-based diet, the NHS would save a total of £6.7 billion per year.

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Plant Based Diet Connected to Lower COVID-19 Rates

- Adam Clare

Covid-19 Transmission graphic

It’s been years that we’ve been living with COVID-19 and it looks like we missed the window to fully eradicate it, which means we need to adapt our lifestyles to ensure that rates of transmission are as low as possible. Of course, the obvious things involve collective action like improving indoor air quality and filtration. As an individual you should consider switching to a plant based diet.

Plant-based and vegetarian groups had a higher intake of vegetables, legumes and nuts, and lower intake of dairy and meat. After adjusting for important confounders, such as body mass index, physical activity and pre-existing medical conditions, the plant-based diet and vegetarian group had 39% (OR=0.61, 95%?CI 0.44 to 0.85; p=0.003) and 39% (OR 0.61, 95%?CI 0.42 to 0.88; p=0.009) lower odds of the incidence of COVID-19 infection, respectively, compared with the omnivorous group. No association was observed between self-reported diets and COVID-19 severity or duration.

Conclusion Plant-based and mainly vegetarian diets were associated with a lower incidence of COVID-19 infection. These dietary patterns may be considered protective against COVID-19 infection. (Study protocol registered in CAAE: 54351421.4.0000.0068.)

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Reducing Food Waste by Setting Goals

- Adam Clare
fruit store

The best way for a regional government to reduce food waste is to set goals. Previous and common efforts focus on messaging and even in increasing the cost of managing food waste for households. New research shows that simply setting food waste reduction goals is enough and even better than other approaches.


This study investigates the effects of food waste (FW) reduction goal setting on waste generation. Using a unique dataset on the status of policy response with goals for household food waste reduction across Japanese municipalities, we estimate the causal effect of setting FW reduction goals in the public plan on household waste output. The results indicate that goal setting reduces waste output by 3.38 kg per capita per year, resulting in a reduction in economic loss due to the discarding of food of approximately US$ 689 million per year. Moreover, we find that goal setting has a larger influence than other waste reducing and recycling policies that do not include reduction goals, such as collection frequency and unit-based pricing systems. Our results highlight the importance of goal setting by local authorities in designing environmental policies for common social goals.

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Kenyan Farm Foments Fossil Free Fertilizer

- Adam Clare


Yes, fertilizers exist that don’t make use of fossil fuels; however, the use of petoreluaem based fertilizers have become a mainstay of modern industrial agriculture. This use of fossil fuels for fertilizer has led to the agriculture sector’s carbon footprint being as large as it is. The transportation of the fuel then as a fertilizer leads to large bills and emissions. Now, a farm in Kenya has started producing fertilizer using solar power. The process uses water to create hydrogen which then gets some nitrogen to form liquid ammonia, a key fertilizer.

Green ammonia, made from water using clean power, promises to curb the climate impact of fertilizer. If produced on site, it could have the added benefit of insulating growers from supply shocks.

“The average bag of fertilizer in sub-Saharan Africa travels 10,000 kilometers,” Talus founder Hiro Iwanaga told Bloomberg. With a small green ammonia plant, like the one coming online in Kenya, “you can locally produce a critical raw material, carbon free

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