Parents tend to go back and forth about whether it's safe for their newborn to be around pets, but it turns out that having one around during a child's early stages of life may lower their chances of developing food allergies.
A recent PLOS One study published in March found that exposure to cats and dogs while a child is in utero or just a few months old was associated with roughly a 14% lower risk of them having a food allergy later on in life.
The strongest benefit was seen in kids who lived with dogs that were kept inside of the house, and for families who owned pets during a child's fetal development and early infancy.
"There is a hypothesis that exposure to furred animal dander earlier in life kind of tilts your immune response away from that of allergy and more towards tolerance," says Dr. Carolyn Kwiat, an allergist and immunologist at Mount Sinai hospital.
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Owning dogs during a child's early development was associated with a lower risk of milk, egg and nut allergies, according to the new study.
While owning a cat seemed to reduce wheat, egg and soybean allergies.
There wasn't a strong association found between food allergies and ownership of birds, turtles and hamsters.
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Research thus far has been conflicting about if having pets while a child is young is actually helpful for preventing the development of food allergies, Kwiat tells CNBC Make It.
"Some studies show that early exposure to furred animal dander does protect against food allergies. Some show it doesn't," she says.
But the recent study, which was conducted in Japan, shows promise because it is the largest of its kind.
"I think what was really striking about this study was that it was 66,000 children which is a lot," says Kwiat. "The larger sample size increases the power of the study."
Still, the study's findings should be taken with a grain of salt, as it was purely observational, she notes. The diagnosis of food allergies was based entirely on a questionnaire completed by parents instead of medical test results.
"The gold standard for any type of study that looks for causation would be a randomized controlled trial," says Kwiat, "with control for other variables like birth order, gender [and] all of those other things. Then, you can more confidently say that it was the actual pet exposure that decreased that risk for food allergies."
"I don't think there's enough recommendations to adopt a pet if you're pregnant to specifically prevent food allergies, just because the data has been so conflicting in the past."
While the study is a "step in the right direction," Kwiat says introducing highly-allergenic foods to children early on, is far more likely to lower a child's chances of developing food allergies later in life.
"Early introduction, we know, helps promote tolerance and prevent allergies," she says. "So, that's what I can say more confidently."
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