ASCIA's Guide to Introducing Allergens: What the Current Guidelines Actually Say

The 2026 ASCIA Guideline: Infant Feeding for Food Allergy Prevention updates the 2016 version with 16 numbered recommendations. Core of it: start solids around six months, not before four (Rec 1). Soon after, add well-cooked egg and age-appropriate peanut (Recs 3-4), one new allergen per meal (Rec 2). Introduce the rest, milk, wheat, tree nuts, sesame, soy, fish, shellfish, across the first year (Rec 5), and keep offering each at least weekly once it's in (Recs 9-11).

Worth knowing: not all 16 recommendations carry the same weight. The timing and egg/peanut recommendations are rated moderate-certainty evidence; several others, including the ones about which foods to add next, are expert consensus rather than trial evidence. ASCIA is upfront about that distinction in the guideline itself, which is part of why we trust it.

This was the part we had wrong. Earlier messaging around allergen introduction often got framed around high-risk infants specifically, babies with an existing food allergy or significant eczema. ASCIA's 16 recommendations don't carve out a separate track for that group. Recommendation 6 is explicit: if your baby already has an allergy to one food, the other common allergens should still be introduced, not paused across the board. There's no separate high-risk protocol here, just one set of recommendations that applies generally, with the usual caveat that your own paediatrician is the one who knows your baby's specific history.

Two recommendations here are more useful day-to-day than they sound. Recommendation 7: a mild rash around the mouth, redness or contact urticaria, that shows up during or right after eating, with nothing else going on, may just be skin contact irritation rather than an allergic reaction. ASCIA's guidance is to try the food again; if broader symptoms show up on a later attempt, that's when to get specialist advice before offering it again. Recommendation 8: don't smear a food on your baby's skin to test for a reaction. It doesn't tell you anything reliable, food can irritate skin without an allergy being involved, and repeated skin contact without actually eating the food may itself be a risk factor for developing a sensitivity. Both of these would have saved us some anxious evenings early on.

Recommendation 12 says it isn't necessary to remove common allergens from a breastfeeding parent's own diet to prevent food allergy, and continued breastfeeding is encouraged while solids are introduced, where possible, with no specific exclusive-breastfeeding cutoff tied to allergen timing. In practice this meant we didn't have to treat starting solids and continuing to breastfeed as an either/or decision, or worry about what we were eating ourselves.

None of this is complicated in principle, but sixteen recommendations and a weekly repeat-exposure habit are easy to lose track of during the actual sleep-deprived months. The app's allergen schedule tracks each food from first taste through introduced or cleared, which was mostly what we needed: a record of what had actually been offered and how often, not just what we meant to get around to. For the full regional labelling picture that sits alongside this guidance, see our breakdown of Australia/NZ's allergen list.