Preventing Allergies In My Baby - Lil Mixins Review

4:12PM Oct 12, 2022

Speakers:

Gemma Evans

Meenal Lele

Keywords:

allergy

allergen

baby

food allergies

eat

feeding

peanut

packets

beatrix

allergenic foods

mix

egg

week

food

early

lil

protein

allergist

study

products

I was nervous about reviewing this product. I'm feeding my baby foods that could be life threatening to me but that is why I'm doing this.

Welcome back to another healthHackers® review. A lot has changed since my last episode. I moved house. Here's my new backdrop. I became a mummy. Here's my new baby. Which brings me neatly onto the products that I'm reviewing for you in this video: the Little Mixins early allergen introduction Daily Mix for babies. A box of little packets of some of the most common food allergens in an infant-safe powder form that are meant to train a baby's immune system to tolerate the foods and therefore potentially prevent a baby from developing an allergy to those foods. That's the idea! As the Little Mixins website puts it: "Train tolerance and stop allergies before they start."

Here's what's going to happen in this video: I'll tell you why I've been using this kit, I'll show you parts of my interview with the Little Mixins founder, Meenal Lele - an allergy mom, author and medical researcher. Then I'll round up what I like and what I don't like about the Little Mixins early allergen introduction Daily Mix. But first, three important points to make: number one, if you're new to the healthHackers® channel, hello! I'm Gemma, I'm a journalist, I interview pioneering figures in health and I review wellness innovations. If you enjoy this video, I'd love it if you hit the 'like' button or even subscribe and leave me a comment below. Number two, anything on healthHackers® should not be considered personal or medical advice. Talk to your health care providers about you and your babies. I'm not a medical expert, I'm a journalist telling you about my personal experience with this product. And number three, I bought my Little Mixins pack from the company's website. I paid for it, it was not a freebie gift. But you as a healthHackers® viewer will be able to get a discount on some Lil Mixins purchases. See the summary text for details.

Now, I bet you already know rates of food allergies are rising here in the US. According to the CDC, one in 13 children or about two students per classroom are thought to be affected by food allergies, and about 40% of children with food allergies are allergic to more than one food. I have an allergy to certain nuts. I carry epinephrine auto injector pens, antihistamines, and an inhaler in my handbag. I often feel anxious when traveling, eating out, even eating in sometimes! I want to help my baby avoid having to grow up with a food allergy like mine. And before I was pregnant, I was looking into the potential for reducing the risk of developing food allergies. Check out healthHackers® episode 56 with Dr. Tina center from the Sean Parker center for allergy and asthma research at Stanford University here in Silicon Valley to learn about the role of diet, dirt and dogs, plus the link between laundry detergent and the rise of allergies. Then - when I was pregnant - I took steps related to microbiome health, nutrition and certain supplements (based on research) to try and minimize my baby's risk. My allergist mentioned early allergen introduction with pre-made infant-safe food pouches like Lil Mixins that my baby could try when she was eating solids. There are studies that suggest the early feeding of peanut and egg from at least four-months of age could help prevent a baby from developing allergies to those foods. Whether or not introducing all allergenic foods early on can have a protective, preventative effect seems to be less clear cut. But the current Dietary Guidelines for Americans says “Potentially allergenic foods (e.g., peanuts, egg, cow milk products, tree nuts, wheat, crustacean shellfish, fish, and soy) should be introduced when other complementary foods are introduced to an infant’s diet.“ So I can understand why companies such as Lil Mixins (there are others like Spoonful One and Ready Set Food) have created baby food products to sell to parents who want to try and help prevent their kids from getting food allergies. I am one of those parents. The Little Mixins Daily Mix box holds 28 mini packets. Four weeks’ worth of seven different allergens to rotate on different days. They are infant safe powder forms of Peanut, egg, cashew, walnut, almond, sesame and soy. The advice is to use a packet a day and keep going until a baby is one. Why one? Here's what the company's founder told me:

The reason we say one, most food allergies tend to develop between the ages of six months and 10 months old. So when doctors say start, you know, after four months old, you're giving a little bias on the early side and a little bias on the later side. In truth, you really actually want to keep eating the food well after one. But hopefully by that point, the child can eat food, right, we don't really want them eating, you know, artificial, not artificial, but why change the form factor? Because if by age one, the child should be able to eat more nut butters and eat whole eggs and things like that. I know of course, some of the nuts you still don't want to do obviously whole peanuts and whole walnuts and things like that. But you know, they can eat a lot of the other form factors and so kind of using special products is less necessary.

To be clear, breast milk is the main source of nutrition for my baby. But after incorporating some solid foods into her diet, we began the Little Mixins Daily Mix allergen introduction process, mixing the packets with her pureed fruits, veg or yogurt, and feeding her each allergen on a different day of the week. Our pediatrician was aware and we actually took my baby girl to eat her very first packet with my allergist close by. It was because my husband and I were nervous she might have inherited my nut allergy. But my daughter was fine. Here is Beatrix being fed by nurse eating walnut powder mixed with my homemade blueberry puree and a bit of breast milk. For my safety, instead of breastfeeding her after she eats the packets I'm allergic to, we've been giving her a bottle of my pumped milk to help wash away the nut traces in her mouth before making contact with my skin. It's my husband who does those feeds. We both wear gloves and there's a thorough cleanup operation afterwards.

I know that you describe the early allergen introduction process as "training wheels for your baby's stomach." So tell us a bit about what you mean by that. And how can you be sure that it does work to prevent a baby from developing food allergies?

Honestly, the only way you ever know prevention works, you know, it's kind of a counterfactual, like you can't really prove the negative, you know, you can't prove that it worked. But what you can see is that you can continue eating the food and you're not reacting to it, right? So a thing that everyone needs to understand, or maybe it's helpful for me to think about is anytime we eat anything, our bodies have a bias towards worrying that this food could be dangerous, right? Because your body has to assume anytime anything goes into your stomach that it could have bad bacteria, it could have something wrong, right? So it's always in alert mode. And so what you're doing by feeding the body these foods in a safe form at this age where the baby's just starting to eat the food is you're actually providing evidence, you know, kind of to the body that this is a safe food. And it starts to build up certain kinds of immune cells, which we call tolerizing cells. So for all of us, we have sort of a reactive part of our immune system that tells our body to go into attack mode and then we also have a tolerizing part of our immune system that tells our body to like, keep it cool. And whenever we have a cold, your body has to do that balance, any kind of virus, anything, right? Because what your body has to do is say, 'Okay, I want to fight off the bacteria. But I don't want to raise my own body temperature so much that I'm going to hurt me'. Right? So what happens is that you always have this balance. And so by, you know, the training wheels are really to kind of give evidence and data in some sense to this tolerizing immune system, and then it learns basically to not call, you know, the nuts or the eggs a threat.

And that's what I want for my daughter for her body not to view these allergenic foods as threats. I asked Meenal about the evidence, the studies. What makes her so sure that feeding these allergens early on could help prevent a baby from developing food allergies later?

Well, whenever we want to ask a question like, 'Will x work to do Y?', the best way to do a study like that is you take two groups of people that are very similar to each other. And in one group of people, you do what's called the intervention and the other group of people, you do a control, you do nothing. And so that's what they did when they wanted to ask the question 'Will feeding peanuts early prevent peanut allergy?' They took 800 babies or you know, they took several hundred babies and they fed them peanuts early. And they took match controls, so very similar babies, but the other half of the babies just continued avoidance. What they found over time was an 80% reduction in the rate of peanut allergy in the babies who were being fed peanut. And this kind of study was repeated over and over. So another thing you look for when you're looking at clinical studies is: was the same finding repeated? That first study was done in the UK. And then there was another study done, actually a second in the UK, then one in Canada. It's been repeated in Australia. And then the same thing happened with egg and so again, you use these two groups of babies, you feed half eggs and half none. What I will point out about that, though is, you know, they found an 80% reduction overall. There's two big points I want you to know about this. Number one is that if babies kept up with the protocol, meaning if they were really good, and I guess it's not the baby's fault, so it's the mom or dad's fault, right? The parents. If the parents were really good about making sure the baby ate enough peanut every single week, there was a 97% reduction in the risk of peanut allergy. And if they did, like some amount of exposure, you know, it was more like 60. And so if you average across all those kids, 80%. The first point I want to make is, sticking to the repeated exposure every single week is really important. The second thing that's important about that is even with 97%, that's not 100, right? So you're gonna have some children who, despite doing this, will still develop the allergy - and again, we can talk about all of that, which is kind of where the book goes - their immune system is in a place where it's just so trigger happy and they end up developing the peanut allergy anyway. But, you know, 97% is really, really good or even 80% risk reduction is really huge. I know you can speak to this, right? Like you have allergies yourself, and would you take an 80% chance that you could not, I'm sure you would, right?

Oh, yeah. And if I wasn't allergic to some tree nuts, this process would feel easier. Foods get stuck under my baby's fingernails, on the high chair, in the sink. If there was a packet that mixed into a bottle of my breast milk instead, that would at least contain some of the risk to me. I noticed other allergens introduction companies do offer ones you can mix into a bottle. So I asked Meenal, why doesn't Little Mixins do the same?

The real limiting factor is that it's actually food. So the more you process it, the more you can potentially put it into a bottle. So I will say that Little Mixins you can take the packets and mix them into breast milk or formula in a bottle. What you will get is some amount of settling because it is a real protein, right? So it won't perfectly suspend or dissolve, I should say, into the milk. And the other reason we really don't want people to mix it into the bottle is because if you think about a bottle of milk, like a four ounce bottle of milk, there's not very much protein in that. And what happens when you eat a really heavy protein meal is you eat less. But we don't want children eating less of their formula or breast milk because that's where 100% of their nutrients are coming from. And you will over time start to affect how much milk they're drinking. But that's a bad outcome actually, right? So we didn't really want that. And the AAP says to mix this into food because they too do not want you to touch how much milk the baby is drinking. So that was the big first reason. But the other limiting factor is if you look at the total protein content of some of the other products, it's the one that you can continue to mix into milk is under one gram of protein. But the only thing that's ever been studied is what happens when a baby eats two grams of protein per sitting. So you know, these are constraints, right? But I think it kind of comes back to early allergen introduction was really meant as a part of complimentary feeding. It's really meant to be part of the baby's diet, like their food side of their diet... you're really just supposed to leave breastfeeding or formula alone. It's kind of sacred in that way, right? We really really want baby to eat and get their hydration and everything else. We just really don't want to affect how that goes. So that's really the reason we tell people we're nervous, if baby drinks even two or three ounces less in a day but now they're getting less fluids, they're getting less nutrients.

Before my interview with Meenal, I bought a box of the packets you can mix into a bottle from another company, but I haven't tried them. The main reason: I noticed the ingredients contain sugar and salt. To be fair to the company - Spoonful One, they say their “products include less than 1 gram of sugar per serving. …about the equivalent of 1 apple slice“. And that “This ensures that baby loves the complicated combination of flavors from seafood to fish to tree nut to sesame!” Because those packets cover 16 foods in a serving and while Little Mixins is free from added sugar the Daily Mix box covers seven allergens leaving out biggies like dairy, shellfish and wheat. I asked Meenal, how come?

Dairy because... 80% of children by age six months are introducing some amount of formula so they're actually already getting dairy exposure. So then we'd be making you pay extra for something you're already feeding your baby. So what's the what's the sense in that? That's the reason we don't do milk. Wheat we found is also relatively simple. It's in a lot of baby cereals and other foods babies are eating. So same thing, right? We're trying not to duplicate things the parents are already paying for and already buying. So that's the big one. Shellfish is an interesting one where it's complicated because shellfish when you really think about it, it's actually like saying tree nut. But shellfish is actually a whole number of allergies, right? You'd actually have to eat the shrimp and the salmon and the cod and the white fish, all the different fishes and stuff. And there's just sort of a bit of a diminishing return there, like they're rarer and rarer, so we went with the ones that were kind of the most probabilistic. The last thing I'll say about that is there was a really good study that Carina Venter did - I believe she's the lead author on this - that showed that just by virtue of diversifying the baby's diet, it protects against more and more allergies. There's a there's a big clinical study going on in the United States right now, a randomized control trial, and even in that study they're not looking at shellfish. And so I just think there's a huge challenge for parents, like, if you want to do two grams of protein in a day, you run out of days in the week, and you have to do it every week. The baby only eats so many times, a lot of people are going to daycare, so what are you supposed to do, right? No solution is really perfect, you know, in that sense.

And on the frequency of exposure... So the box says use one packet daily. The website says two to three times a week. What is the minimum frequency to achieve maximum benefit in your view?

So according to the clinical studies, and the study was called the EAT study, done out of the UK - they found that two grams of every protein a week was kind of the floor of what you wanted to do. And so you want to get every packet in. So when a baby does only one protein, because I think that's the challenge is that some people only want to do peanut, right? And then you actually want them to eat a little bit more of it because that's the only allergen exposure they're getting. Whereas when you do the box everyday, you're still eating an allergen, right? So again, kind of going back to that diet diversity thing, they do have this sort of like cross behavior, that just by pushing your body to think about soy, it becomes a little bit more tolerant of you know, walnut, you know what I mean? But if you're only doing peanut, and that's the only allergen that you're eating, you need to do a little bit more of it. And that's kind of where the clinical studies have ended up. So the LEAP study looked only at peanut that EAT study did everything.

With the box, I've got seven packets to use in a week. So where the website says you can just use it TWO to THREE times a week, is that saying I can use any of my seven packets?

No, no. So it's talking about if you just use the peanut, you know, like, if you're ONLY using the peanut, you're not using the box. It does get a little confusing, I agree with you.

OK - about this confusion over frequency of exposure. Lil Mixins also sells tubs of just peanut, and just tree nut - and suggests using those THREE TIMES a week. There’s also a tub of egg powder and the website suggests using that TWO TO THREE times a week. But the Daily Mix box, that I have been using has seven allergens, with the recommendation of one a day which means - across a week, I’m feeding Beatrix just ONE portion of PEANUT and one portion of EGG. Got it?

The data is a little bit confusing. There's been different studies. When the peanut study looked at only peanut and they didn't think about any other allergen, they did two times a week, right? And the egg study that was only egg - two times a week. But then the one study that looked at what happens if we try and eat seven, eight, ten different kinds of foods, they could only do it once a week, right, one per day. And so that's really where these protocols come from. That's the best data we have, is exactly what worked in a big clinical study.

And what was the protective effect of that study where they ate a different one [allergen] every day?

If they ate two grams of the protein in a week. So eating one packet a day, you know, doing it every week, then you got the protective effects, same same sort of overall, across the different allergens, I believe it was like 60% reduction in food allergy, and you get differential effect. The big challenge in the EAT study is they weren't giving people products. So the adherence was really, really bad. And so they found good data, they got good results when people adhered to it. But if you ask someone to, you know, make even the egg because you're supposed to boil it first, and then feed it to the baby and like do that every week and people just quit. It was really good but it was hard to get people to keep up with it.

So the minimum frequency to achieve maximum benefit is... I've got to do a sachet a day. Just keep going.

Yep.

Until she's one and then after that I've got to try and incorporate real foods... every single day?

No. We don't know. Honestly. We don't know because like, the studies can only tell you what the study studied. And so we just know that continuing frequency, the hope is that by not having the allergy, she'll just make this part of her diet. She'll be eating pestos and she'll be eating, like I said, nut butters or, you know, a banana bread with walnuts in it or things like that. She'll just be eating it and then it'll be fine. I think you really want to be - I can't think of a better word than militant. You want to be rigorous! That's the word I was looking for. Rigorous, really in that six to 10 month timeframe.

Ultimately, I asked my allergist, Dr June Zhang at Latitude Food Allergy Care, for her thoughts on whether I should stick with the Daily Mix of SEVEN allergenic foods at one per day across a week, or to switch to fewer allergens but feeding those same ones more often. In an email, she responded: "There isn't scientific evidence supporting an optimal frequency of exposure across allergens yet — other than for peanuts. So at this time we consider any frequent exposure of these other foods to be beneficial." 

For the remainder of my chat with Meenal, we spoke about her book The Baby and The Biome, a book about her firstborn son Leo's multiple food allergies, asthma, eczema combined with research and suggestions around protecting the health of our children's microbiomes from damage that could potentially increase the risk of developing issues like food allergies. Check out healthHackers® episode 62 for that. I will link to it in the summary text that goes with this video.

It’s been over a month since I started using the Lil Mixins Daily Mix packets. It was going well until Beatrix started vomiting a few hours after the egg packets. She’s had five egg servings across five weeks. The first three were fine. So - at the time of recording this video - we are waiting to see what our allergist says about that. I told Meenal. She said “It is still possible to develop an allergy while doing early introduction.” We will wait and see what the doctor says. In the meantime, I’m ready to round up my 'LIKES' and 'DISLIKES' about my experience with Lil Mixins Daily Mix.

We’ll start with my 'dislikes'. When I sat down to list these, it became clear that most of the things I don’t like are probably more about the early allergen introduction practice, than they are about the product. For example, it’s been scary because I’m a new mom. Feeding any solids is new to me. And then throw in some highly allergenic ones, whilst trying to protect myself from an allergic response too - that can be uncomfortable. So I appreciated the support from my allergist and our pediatrician.

It’s messy. Yep - that’s what happens when you feed babies. Thankfully, I have a husband who is able to feed and clean up the packets I’m allergic to. It would be helpful to have a powder that I could occasionally just mix into a bottle - but you already heard what Meenal said about that.

Frequency. I was getting confused about how often I was supposed to be feeding Beatrix the allergens for the most benefit. But like my allergist told me: “There isn't scientific evidence supporting an optimal frequency of exposure across allergens yet — other than for peanuts.” Another point I want to make about frequency is that following the Lil Mixins instructions to feed a packet a day means, at times, it can feel somewhat regimented. However, like I said, these dislikes may be more about the practice of early introduction than the product itself.

But cost is a 'dislike' that can be attributed to Lil Mixins. The Daily Mix box is $44.99 . Or you can subscribe for $40.49 every 28 days. That feels pricey to be paying until Beatrix is one. The cost is similar to other brands on the market though.

And finally, it’d be good if there were packets for other major allergens like dairy, shellfish and wheat. But I get it, there are only so many days in the week, and I have been incorporating dairy by mixing some packets with yogurt.

OK - now for my 'likes'. Simplicity - it has been simple to use mix-in infant-safe powders, compared to, I would imagine trying to create meals with the natural forms of cashew, walnut, sesame, peanut, almonds, egg and soy - that have a consistency safe enough for my baby to eat. That would be time consuming at the very least. The packets are measured portions with two grams of protein per sitting which corresponds with the amounts used in that peanut study Meenal mentioned. Also, individual packets make it easier to travel with.

Purity - The ingredients list has no added sugar or salt. It’s organic and the website says “Each protein is made in a separate facility” and “packaged in a facility with tight cleaning procedures to prevent cross-contamination.”

Diversity - The Daily Mix covers SEVEN foods. I like that my baby is getting that nutritional exposure in an infant-safe form. And because the packets hold an allergen each, we had a better idea of what Beatrix might have reacted to when she was vomiting. In our case, the egg sachets.

Story - Meenal is an allergy mom. On the Lil Mixins website she says her life changed when her firstborn son developed multiple food allergies and then she found it hard preparing allergenic foods for her second son. It says the company’s mission is to “make early introduction easy so we can put an end to food allergies.” So really, my 'like' here is that I admire and respect that Meenal has used her story, her knowledge from the experiences with her little boy, and turned them into something that could help others.

So that’s it for my 'likes' and 'dislikes'. I want to say something about safety before I go. Not just the standard medical disclaimer I already said earlier, but…you know I felt nervous when feeding Beatrix some of the allergens for the first time. My allergist told me what antihistamine I could keep on hand and how much to give her if needed. So please talk to your doctors about your baby, your intentions with early introduction, and get advice from them. If you see a reaction - seek medical attention. We will be working with our healthcare providers regarding what happened with Beatrix.

That’s it for this episode. If you found this video interesting or useful, I would love it if you hit the 'like' button, or subscribe and leave me a comment below. It really means a lot when you support my work and give feedback in that way. Thank you for watching. Bye bye.