But it is likely to follow recommendations made by the Food Standards Agency’s Committee on Toxicity which recently warned that the ‘deliberate exclusion or delayed introduction of specific allergenic foods may increase the risk of allergy’.

In January, the National Institute of Health in the US updated its own guidelines saying that infants should be exposed to peanut-containing food from as early as four months to desensitise their immune system. However the new study suggests that mothers could begin building tolerance from day one.

The allergy epidemic is growing annually in the UK, with number of sufferers increasing by five per cent each year. In 2011/2012 here were 18,471 hospital admissions for allergies in England, but that had grown to 25, 093 by 2015/2016 and the number of cases of life-threatening anaphylactic shock has risen six fold in 20 years.