Step 1: Jot down your ideas and share with a partner.
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What is your experience with allergies? Are you allergic to anything? Do any of your family members or friends have any allergies?
Step 2: Read a Times article about a recent study.
Read the New York Times article “Peanut Allergies Have Plummeted in Children, Study Shows,” published on Oct. 20, 2025. It begins:
Food allergies in children dropped sharply in the years after new guidelines encouraged parents to introduce infants to peanut products, a study has found.
For decades, as food allergy rates climbed, experts recommended that parents avoid exposing their infants to common allergens. But a landmark trial in 2015 found that feeding peanut products to babies could cut their chances of developing an allergy by over 80 percent. In 2017, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases formally recommended the early-introduction approach and issued national guidelines.
The new study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, found that food allergy rates in children under 3 fell after those guidelines were put into place — dropping to 0.93 percent between 2017 and 2020, from 1.46 percent between 2012 and 2015. That’s a 36 percent reduction in all food allergies, driven largely by a 43 percent drop in peanut allergies.
The study also found that eggs overtook peanuts as the No. 1 food allergen in young children.
The study did not examine what infants ate, so it does not show that the guidelines caused the decline. Still, the data is promising. While all food allergies can be dangerous, 80 percent of people never outgrow a peanut allergy.
Step 3: Analyze the study.
1. What was the scientific question that researchers wanted to answer?
2. How did researchers plan and carry out their investigation?
3. What are your takeaways from the video above? Why do you think the researchers created this video?
4. What new data did the investigation yield? (Data is the factual information collected during observations, experiments or studies.)
5. What significance does this research have for science, the world or our lives?
6. What is one thing you learned about this study or about how scientists approach their work?
7. What further questions do you have about this research and its significance?
Step 4: Work with others to come up with your own scientific investigation.
In this study, researchers tried to better understand trends in peanut allergies in children. Collaborate with others to propose another scientific investigation about health trends in children. For example, a scientist might want to investigate changing rates of other chronic conditions in children, such as allergies, asthma and diabetes.
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What scientific question might you want to answer?
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Briefly describe how you might design a study using similar techniques mentioned in the article to try to answer that question.
More?
• Science Practice, a new resource aligned with the Science and Engineering Practices for the Next Generation Science Standards, aims to help students better understand how scientists actively gather evidence-based knowledge and solve problems. Learn more about this feature in this introductory post.
• See all the lesson plans in this series.
The post Science Practice | A Study on Peanut Allergies appeared first on New York Times.
