Women who eat nuts during pregnancy - and who aren't allergic themselves - are less likely to have kids with nut allergies, a new study suggests, Newsmax Health reports.

 Dr. Michael Young, an associate clinical professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and colleagues collected data on more than 8,200 children of mothers who took part in the Nurses' Health Study II. The women had reported what they ate before, during and after their pregnancies.

About 300 of the children had food allergies. Of those, 140 were allergic to peanuts and tree nuts.

The researchers found that mothers who ate the most peanuts or tree nuts -- five times a week or more -- had the lowest risk of their child developing an allergy to these nuts.

"Food allergies have become epidemic," said Dr. Ruchi Gupta, an associate professor of pediatrics at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

The new findings do not demonstrate or prove a cause-and-effect relationship between women eating nuts during pregnancy and lower allergy risk in their children, Young said.

"The results of our study are not strong enough to make dietary recommendations for pregnant women," he said.

"Mothers should not be fearful of eating certain foods and should go on with their regular cravings and their regular diets and not avoid things to try to protect their child from allergy," Gupta said.

This study suggests that exposure to nuts early in life might protect kids from developing an allergy to them -- a theory that also has been linked to other foods to which kids are commonly allergic, Gupta said. "The problem is that we do not have enough strong data to recommend this," she said.