I would say that if you do introduce things earlier not to stress about it. My second child ate chocolate pretty early on as the eldest one fed it to her on several occasions ;)
Re: berries, where did you get the guidelines about berries from and what is the reason to wait until a year until you give them to kids? In the UK, I never heard of berries being on the restricted list and it is common practice to feed small kids berries. What I am more concerned about is the pesticides on the berries and for this reason would not give give them to kids unless they were organic.
Nuts, ground up are fine, it is the choking hazard that doctors warn parents about.
What I did was give my children all kinds of foods to taste themselves and they decided what they liked, I never gave my children honey before a year old though and gave them raw milk, butter and cheese in place of all pasteurized milk products. Now they sometimes have pasteurized milk products (aged 8 and 5) and can cope with it. I never gave them gluten and now, I restrict one of them as I have seen signs of a gluten allergy (same as me), whereas the other one can cope with bread once in a while.
You just have to play it by ear.
All I can say is that ANY food you withhold from a child could prove to be problematic in later years, look at MSG, additives, even pasteurised milk, and in addition look at all the children who regularly eat all those things and have done since early on and know no different, even though many of them have low to high grade allergies because of eating them. You are in such a great position that you already KNOW about these potential dangers before your child is eating them and can watch for symptoms and then tailor your child's diet appropriately.
I think that you have to bite the bullet and stick on the paleo diet for as long as possible and bring up a healthy child who will be stronger at fighting colds and other viruses during childhood.
So, when exactly do you envision him suddenly being exposed to gluten? Will it be when he grows up and leaves home? I worry about my children leaving home and suddenly bingeing on all the things they never had as children, like sugar, bread, sodas etc. But that is something that I am tackling through trying to educate them about the benefits of good fat, the dangers of flour and sugar etc.....Every time we sit down to eat I tell them why I have served them what I have served them and my 5 year old often tells me that fatty meat is the thing to eat first from the plate.
The reality is though that your son will be exposed to these things much earlier than that, when he goes to play dates, he will be offered sandwiches, soda, sugar. If he has never eaten any of those things he may go mad on them when his parents are not around......so, education is a great way to let him know that these foods will be on offer and for the sake of a well balanced child I would say, feed him some foods on the danger list once every so often and discuss food with him regularly (when he is old enough of course).
At least your son developing a gluten/lactose/whatever allergy in the future can be tackled head on, you already have the knowledge you need to address the problems when they turn up and then it will be a question of playing it by ear.
