K A S H R U T . C O M_©

July 24, 2024 from Times of Israel:

"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.

"pproximately 640 infants, aged 4 to 11 months, who showed a tendency to develop various allergies such as eczema and egg allergy were selected for the study. Half of those infants were already sensitive to peanuts; half were not.

"Each group was then divided into two – infants who regularly ate Bamba until the age of five and those who did not.

"When the infants turned five years old, the researchers found that only 10% of those who ate Bamba developed a peanut allergy; 35% of the children who avoided peanuts developed the allergy.

"In the follow-up study, researchers again checked the children, who had turned 12.

"They found similar results. In the group that avoided peanuts, 15.4% of participants had developed a peanut allergy. In the group that consumed peanuts, only 4.4% had the allergy. That means that the prevalence of peanut allergy among the children who avoided Bamba was about three times higher than those who ate the snack.

"Yet no study explains why some children get peanut and other food allergies and others do not."