Eating Bamba, Israel’s quintessential peanut-butter-flavored snack, is proven to reduce peanut allergies in children by 75 percent, according to a recent study in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, bearing out what many Israelis already know.

The longitudinal study began in 2008 when a group of British and Israeli researchers were intrigued by how peanut allergy in Israeli children was significantly less common compared to Jewish children in the UK with similar genetic backgrounds.

They hypothesized that the low level of peanut allergy in Israeli children resulted from their high level of peanut-flavored snacks from an early age. They set out to test it, eventually proving right their hypothesis.

 

“Slackers, give yourselves a pat on the back for giving your children Bamba” instead of a “fresh and nutritious zucchini quiche,” Shimshoni and Brodsky begin. “You may have prevented your children from developing a peanut allergy.”

In their article, The New England Journal of Medicine researchers said that peanuts are a common culinary ingredient, and “hard to avoid.”

Treatments to protect children against reactions from peanut exposure “would improve the children’s socialization and the quality of life of the children and their families,” the researchers wrote.

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