According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States in 2007 around 3 million children under 18 had food allergies - a rise of 18% since 1997.
The CDC says in 2006 about 6.8 million children suffered from some sort of allergy and for some reason which remains unclear there are a growing number of children with allergies to foods such as peanuts, eggs and fish and these affected children are two to four times as likely to have related conditions such as asthma or other allergies.
Experts say while improvements in diagnosis could partly explain the increase, allergies do appear to be more common at present than they were a generation ago.
A suspected culprit in the increase in both food and environmental allergies is thought to be the 'hygiene hypothesis' where the current vogue for scrupulous cleanliness removes the immune system benefits from early exposure to bacteria.
Some experts suggest that the more hygienic the environment, the more allergies there will be while others believe that a lack of exposure to specific foods in infancy may result in allergies to those foods later on.
Once an allergy develops the only option is to manage the symptoms and at present how to prevent allergies from developing in the first place, remains a dilemma.
Research suggests that the causes of allergies are a complex mixture of genetics and environment but a new study of 8,600 Jewish children in the United Kingdom and Israel may ultimately provide some insight.
The British and Israeli researchers found that the early consumption of peanuts in infancy was linked with a low prevalence of peanut allergy.
The researchers say despite guidelines recommending avoidance of peanuts during infancy in the UK, Australia, and, until recently, North America, peanut allergy continues to increase in these countries.
They set out to determine the prevalence of peanut allergy among Israeli and UK Jewish children and the relationship with peanut consumption by mothers and children.
The study involved 5,171 schoolchildren in the UK and 5,615 in Israel and included a questionnaire on peanut consumption and weaning involving 77 infants in the UK and 99 in Israel.
The researchers found that the UK Jewish children had 10 times more peanut allergies than the Israeli infants and the difference came down to the fact that the Israeli infants consume peanut in high quantities in the first year of life, whereas UK infants avoid peanuts.