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Comment by chadash | Hacker News Reader

This is not new news, but nonetheless important to replicate and keep studying. I think the first often-cited study about this was in 2008 [1]. There are several more, including one in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015 [2].

Basically, the original study looked at Jewish kids in Israel versus the UK and saw that peanut allergies were about 10x lower in Israel, even though Jews of European background (Ashkenazi) there are fairly similar, genetically, to Ashkenazi Jews in the UK (the majority of both groups migrated recently from Central and Eastern Europe).

There is a snack called Bamba that they eat in Israel. It's kind of like a peanut butter Cheeto puff, and it is a nearly-universal snack for young kids in Israel. It melts in your mouth, so a 6-month-old can eat it almost as soon as they eat solid foods. It's about as popular in Israel as Cheerios are in the US, maybe more so. The hypothesis is that Bamba consumption there dramatically lowers the risk of developing peanut allergies.

[1] https://www.webofscience.com/wos/woscc/full-record/WOS:00026...

[2] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa1414850

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For anyone wondering, Trader Joe's sells these in the US! They're great, and they're "real" Bamba and not a TJ's replica.

I was seeing that, I was a bit surprised that it seemed like the actual branded product. My habit is to figure out who makes that kind of stuff, when I saw Osem, I was thinking "how haven't they been acquired by some behemoth?" And then quickly found "ah nevermind, nestle"

Peanut butter cheetos sounds like an incredible proposition, I'm going to be looking around for them this weekend!

Trader Joes (and Costco) are just fine selling branded product if they can get a deal for it cheap enough. It's usually the manufacturer that doesn't want to "cheapen their brand" to hit the price points, but they're willing to "bulk up" for Costco or sell direct to Trader Joes at times.

Also a lot of things at Trader Joes are just white labeled versions of other products. As in, literally the same product, just inside packaging that says "Trader Joe's <Similar Name to Other Product>"

Many years ago I worked at a candy company. I tell you more. MOST of "private label" stuff is actually manufactured by the same company as the "name brand", what is more companies routinely manufacture stuff for each other depending on the factory loads, e.g. our plant would manufacture Reese's despite having no relation to the brand and it's a very common practice.

I worked for a cookie company. Sometimes we would just swap the boxes for the name brand in the packaging machine while the line was running. The funny thing is, one box said it had some ingredient in it (it didn't) and the other one didn't.

Also at some point one company asked the cookie company to create a recipe to imitate some other product so they could compete. Except the cookie company was the one making that other product. So they copied themselves, it wasn't too hard...

>we would just swap the boxes for the name brand in the packaging machine while the line was running.

Any difference in consumer price of the identical product would be largely due to advertising.

Wait until you hear about designer handbags.

From what I hear, the top designers there don't actually need advertising.

Oh like you’re saying top designers do not spend millions on marketing, my sweet summer child.

It’s not that brands spend money on ads so they have to raise the prices. It’s that advertising enables brands to charge more because they can

That sounds like an industry where a few large players have gobbled up everyone else and entrenched themselves, and they're all relatively happy with their market share (i.e. they aren't competing), and are thus happy to help "competitors" because what they want more than anything else is stability, and to keep new entrants from the market that actually might change things.

You know, collusion. Or emergent behavior that's essentially the same (but even that, while not necessarily illegal, is still bad for consumers).

it's not really all that sinister. It's just you have a factory and you have workers and sometimes you need more work for them than your company can provide. Just because you can manufacture items for your competitor does not mean you are colluding. I'll tell you more, a lot of competitors use the same suppliers, like for example Ford and GM, will use LG for a lot of components. LG then can't share any tech they developed for GM when working with Ford, but it's not like they get a lobotomy.

People who work at Apple use AWS and people at Amazon use MacBooks. It's all complicated, but not sinister.

Similar things happen in the tech world - lots of various products are manufactured by a few; TVs being a really good example. There are only a few panel manufacturers out there.

We went on a factory tour at Cabot Creamery in VT several years ago, and they were packaging an off-label that day. The guide didn't specify what store it was for, but we thought we recognized it. When we went to TJ's the next week, we saw that same exact packaging on the shelves.

Yeah, at a job I worked at before there were two differences between our branded product and the store brand: The packaging/label, and the amount of thickener so that it would have a slightly different texture. Otherwise, same employees making it on the same machines with the same ingredients.

They did always have that one small change in there though, so that it wouldn't be exactly the same. Nothing you'd ever notice as a customer. Just a technicality so that each one could claim their own unique formula.

I think with another type of product it wasn't the thickness but a slight difference in the ratio of the flavorings - more raspberry and less blueberry here, more blueberry and less raspberry there.

Those are the companies that don't want to admit selling their stuff for cheaper, so they get it store-branded.

I can't reply to the deeper comments, so I'll reply here. The "store branded" products are also sometimes the exact same stuff, but they pay less (or the premium brands pay a premium) to have "first run" rights. That is, the premium brands are packaged first, right after a cleaning, so you're less likely to have "inclusions" like chunks of tomato goop in your ketchup.

That's not always true. I actually don't know how true it is at all. At least in facilities that I know about, everything was manufactured exactly the same, there was no such thing as "first run after cleaning", as far as I know "first run" premium has more to do with volumes and scheduling (e.g. at a candy factory you'll get priority to get your orders filled before halloween) or if any equipment goes down your orders will always be prioritized

you say it like it's a sort of corporate slut-shaming, but it's not. If you build a factory big enough to make 1/2 the cheese puffs in the world, there's an incentive to make it bigger and make all the cheese puffs in the world. Going from small batch bake/frying to assembly line flow is the 1st step, but once you're over that hurdle, you might as well go big, as long as you can handle the risk of being stuck with the risk of owning the 2nd biggest cheese puff tumbler in the world. That type of cooking is a natural monopoly.

that's the factory, but brands don't come from the factory, they come from the market, and have different reputations, strategies, customers and distribution channels. If you have a giant computer controlled cheese puffery, it's not that big a deal to change the formulation of the cheese, change the logo bags, etc. all on the fly, and it's much cheaper for you to do it than a smaller less sophisticated operation making you more customizable and still the low-cost producer.

did you know that even if you aren't a very big pizzeria or bakery you can order custom-milled flour from King Arthur for your restaurant? Their factory can handle it, and it engenders brand loyalty from fussy chefs.

>did you know that even if you aren't a very big pizzeria or bakery you can order custom-milled flour from King Arthur for your restaurant? Their factory can handle it, and it engenders brand loyalty from fussy chefs.

I didn't. Although I'm not that surprised given I think King Arthur Flour has maybe around 500 employees or so including a cafe, retail shop, and cooking classes and sells a pretty premium product. (Was actually surprised the number is so low. It's also employee-owned.)

> That type of cooking is a natural monopoly.

Should bulk cheese puffs be state owned?

Seize the means of cheese puff production!

I have no problem with it myself; but the companies/brands certainly do.

Lots of national brands have a "this is not produced in a factory or machine that produces any store brand".

> I have no problem with it myself; but the companies/brands certainly do.

actually, the companies don't have a problem with it, the customers do. customers (it's human nature, maslow's hierarchy, etc) cling to their beliefs about themselves and their identification with products that reflect their values. Companies would rather cut costs and sell one-size-fits-all products, but they need to give customers what they want, and different customers want different things.

> Lots of national brands have a "this is not produced in a factory or machine that produces any store brand"

and many people have the need to think that they are "better" than store brands, or more likely on HN, that they "see through" all the marketing, so companies market to you "transparently"... if a brand says "this is not produced X way" and you didn't even mention X, hmmm, do you really think they haven't figured you out?

if you are the cheese puff king, the most expensive thing you can do is not sell everybody exactly what they want, and you probably have redundancy in your manufacturing facilities, so why not segregate which products are on which machines, so long as a market segments aren't too small.

As a kid I think it was Colgate who had a tagline of “We don’t make toothpaste for anyone else”, which utterly confused me at the time

CNBC has a youtube video on the economics of Trader Joe's and the piece that stuck out to me is that they will have essentially a white label option, but have it slightly modified so it is "unique" to them

Ive got family who have worked in food production lines, it's often not the same product, maybe a slightly modified recipe or using different ingredients or ratios.

Yeah, sometimes they mix it up enough to claim it's not the same, sometimes it's even openly branded as being the same (think Costco tortilla chips)

https://www.costcobusinessdelivery.com/kirkland-signature-to...

I've seen Trader Joes selling branded canned chili (Stagg) and the cashier remarked that they were only stocking it that week for the super bowl.

I love cheetos and pb (I even put PB powder in my smoothies), but having tried these many times, they are not very tasty. I understand that some people who at them a lot as very little kids continue to like them as adults. But they have never been tempting to me, even when we had them in the house for the purpose of feeding them to our babies.

Yeah I have to say those sound excellent. Time to go hunting.

https://www.traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/058373

"Bamba Peanut Snacks contain just four, simple ingredients: corn grits, peanut paste, palm oil, and salt."

The palm oil is less than ideal but this isn't exactly health food to begin with.

>palm oil is less than ideal

Why do you say this? Just curious. Palm oil is one of the better plant oils, no?

Palm oil generates an incredible amount of pollution in Internet comment sections whenever it is mentioned, because people don't realize that it's simply the most productive oil per unit acre by far. If not for Indonesian rainforest palm oil you'd need to cut down 2-3x as much Brazilian rainforest for soybeans or Phillippine rainforest for coconuts to meet the same demand. 71% of palm oil is consumed between the Caspian Sea and the Pacific. Approximately one-third is used for nonfood applications, particularly the Indonesian biodiesel industry, which if you wanted to do something about deforestation, you could pay them to stop doing that in particular.

https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/palm-oil...

It is a saturated fat, but it's being mixed with highly unsaturated peanut oil, so the whole-product average is probably insignificant.

I went searching regarding your claim about how productive various types of oil are per acre.

It’s actually insane, and palm oil is at least 400% better than the next best.

Edit: coconut oil production is variable depending on where you check. It might be half as good as palm oil.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-yield-by-crop

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Average-plant-oil-yield-...

https://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html

Massive harm of the environment by companies that farm it. Orangutans' habitat for one.

Massive amounts of inflammatory PUFAs.

No, palm oil is terrible and everywhere in ultra processed food because it's extremely cheap.

There are few healthy vegetable oils and they tend to be very expensive: olive, macadamia, coconut, etc.

EDIT: I stand corrected, it has moderate amounts of PUFA, but terrible Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio (45/1), which is thought to have metabolic consequences.

My understanding has been that it's cheap, saturated, and solid/stable, so it's a straightforward replacement for the hydrogenated oils that were previously being used in many of the same applications before the whole trans fat issue banished them.

Canola oil is cheap and it improves health outcomes in humans despite twitter sophistry.

The main problem with palm oil isn’t health afaik, it’s the orangutan habitat destruction since most palm oil still comes from wild forests instead of farming.

https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/8-things-know-about-palm-oil

Palm oil is full of saturated fats isn't it?

Palm oil harvesting is killing endangered orangutans.

If they used tasty healthy lard the product wouldn't sell very well in Israel or anywhere else in the Near East...

Similar to the palm oil, when imported, the tallow comes in on chemical tankers (whose cargo tanks' most recent cargoes were things like benzene or methanol at the cleanest).

Yum.

Tallow, from cattle and sheep, would be fine I think. Pigs are considered unclean for some reason. Benzene is just a sunscreen ingredient.

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/benzene-in-sunscreen/

Cleaning is mandatory but I am wondering who is controlling...

>who is controlling...

Depends on which port and which personnel.

The better informed are all aware that after discharge, if the remaining barrels of benzene or methanol can be completely removed by suction and evaporation from the designated edible oil compartments and all associated pipelines and hoses, there is never any cleaner equipment.

Considering earlier voyages, there is no way 12 hours of shipyard cleaning is going to be as effective at removing traces of previous cargoes like acrylonitrile or spent transformer oil, compared to a full voyage when loaded with hundreds of tonnes of such a clean, strong solvent as high-purity benzene or methanol.

So you can only imagine whether everyone involved will all play their supposed part to the fullest extent you might have in mind when preparing for bulk edible oils. Every time.

Sometimes expediting the movement will have to take precedence, other times there "just might" be the attitude of "why bother?"

And when you're the one climbing down inside the vessel compartment to inspect for cleanliness, there can be quite a bit of pressure not to reject a tank that looks so clean (as long as there is no obvious wetness) compared to some of the other choices on board the same ship. Once any of the crew or yourself has been down there and come back up without immediate ill effects, it's been long thought it can't be that bad unless you actually saw something wrong visually.

Certificates of Cleanliness, if required, will always be a part of the paperwork package.

And may I remind you it's the methanol that carries the skull & crossbones, not the benzene.

I might be mistaken, but IIRC it originally (as in, 60 years ago) contained peanuts, salt, and that’s it. 100% peanuts were replaced by 50% peanuts+50% corn some time in the last 30 years.

Yep. We used that with our kid and he seems to have avoided peanut allergy. It also tastes pretty good! But, it didn't stop him from developing a walnut/pecan allergy. Probably because we don't really eat either of those in our house.

Same... My daughter had tree nut allergy(worst is cashew).

Peanut I found out are technically legumes, where as pecan, almond, cashew, walnut, pistachio, etc are tree nuts.

So while we call them all "nuts", peanuts are quite different than tree nuts.

Daughter developed severe tree nut allergy(that we don't leave home without 2x EpiPen) by age 3.

Had pleanty of foods with peanut butter, but seldom tree nut exposure (outside of mixed nuts which she was too young to consume).

She can eat peanut products just fine, but we end up telling everyone all nuts allergy including peanuts... As some people don't know the difference.

Now I am finding everything "peanut free" is not always tree nuts free, there's different labeling =/

Cashew is in alot of vegan foods and South Asian dishes (though alot of restaurants stopped using cashew based thickener now, some still do).

As someone who loves walnuts and pecans, I find this tragic. I had no idea that was a possible outcome. Sorry to hear that. I will advise new parents to investigate.

My child also has walnut/pecan allergy. I don't recall him eating much Bamba before (I'm from Israel originally, so it won't surprise me if he did). No peanut allergy luckily. It triggered when he was quite young after eating brownies with pecan/walnut.

they are also somehow cheaper here than in Israel and it is infuriating to me

I know! $1.30?? Some crazy subsidy magic is happening at TJs

Target sells them too:

https://www.target.com/p/osem-bamba-peanut-butter-baby-puffs...

How serendipitous! I just saw these at my Trader Joe's for the first time a week or two ago and I've been addicted to them.

They're delicious by the way, once you get over the fact that they look a lot like Cheetos.

I love those things! I usually end up always grabbing a bag when I go shopping there.

I've found them at HEB and Randall's too!

I’ve found them at Publix in SC.

If you can't find Bamba but you have European or Balkan shop nearby you can try buying Smoki [1], it's the same thing.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=smoki&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwiE...

Looks like it's what's called Erdnussflips in Germany

Amusingly, I tried to convince my ex (Serbian) that Smoki and Erdnussflips are the same thing. I filled a Smoki bag with German (ja! brand) Erdnussflips, and she immediately noticed, though there were a few seconds of confused looks (and laughter).

Well ja! are definitely not the best Erdnussflips you can get, i would've noticed too that they don't taste that good.

Aldi sometimes sells these here in the us. They're similar to Bamba, but not as fluffy. It's a coarser-ground corn, I think. e.g. https://aldithings.com/deutsche-kuche-peanut-puffs/

I just tried some last night, in a side-by-side comparison with real Erdnussflips. Bamba have a smoother/softer texture (less crunchy), and the peanut flavor is weaker.

I used to eat the living crap out of Smoki. Could probably take on a 100m tall peanut monster.

TJs carries Bamba.

> There is a snack called Bamba that they eat in Israel. It's kind of like a peanut butter Cheeto puff, and it is a nearly-universal snack for young kids in Israel. It melts in your mouth, so a 6-month-old can eat it almost as soon as they eat solid foods. It's about as popular in Israel as Cheerios are in the US, maybe more so. The hypothesis is that Bamba consumption there dramatically lowers the risk of developing peanut allergies.

Target sells these "Lil Mixins" sachets that contain peanut powder. They're designed to mix in to milk or oatmeal, etc. The packaging says you can use them with kids as young as 4 months. They also sell similar sachets of tree nuts and egg powder.

It’s a full-on trend in the US to feed these to your baby to prevent peanut allergies. My daughter probably ate her own weight in Bamba.

Man, I had an Israeli boss that turned me onto Bamba. Loved that stuff.

Anecdotally, giving our baby Bamba was actually how we discovered his peanut allergy, which was later confirmed by a traditional allergen skin test administered by a doctor. (We noticed puffy redness around his lips after his first piece of Bamba.)

They researched bamba, but then recommended peanut butter.

I remember reading that boiled and roasted peanuts have different allergen profiles, and are not interchangeable.

If you want to do this with your child, use actual bamba, not peanut butter.

Bamba is also delicious. The fat content from the peanut butter gives it a good body, like a cheese puff.

If you decide to get some for your kid, get some extra for yourself.

TJ's also sold some that were dipped in dark chocolate. They are the unholy hybrid of vanishing caloric density and a peanut butter cup.

TJs also sells Nutella filled bamba

I'm pretty sure most of the fat content comes from the palm oil, but I don't disagree with your conclusion.

That's fascinating! In ex-Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Croatia in my case) we were raised on Smoki which looks very similar!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoki

Yeah, in USSR we also had these corn puffs(Кукурузные Палочки). Bamba is different despite looking the same. It has very "peanutty" taste (and ingridient) unlike the corn puffs which are just sweet.

Confusingly enough, there is also “red bamba” available in Israel (officially called “sweet bamba” but everyone calls it red bamba) which has no peanuts - only corn and an outer sweet red coating with a berry-ish flavor.

An American friend told me it looks and tastes like captain crunch berries, and it is unfair that American kids have only a few in a serving, and israeli kids can just get bags of them.

These are called "Erdnussflips" (peanut flips) in Germany and Austria. Apparently they were first sold around the same time as Bamba, in 1967. Smoki came a little later. I wonder who copied whom here.

In Germany they are mostly sold along potato chips (crisps), but they aren't as popular as them. And unlike Bamba they are usually not fed to small children, as far as I'm aware. Good to know they seem to protect against allergy, as peanut butter is not really a thing here.

As popular as it is, I wonder if there's effectively microdosing happening from baby's 1st week, even before they eat it themselves?

Good question, I mean how many people were actually feeding Cheeto puffs to their 6 month old before it became a health trend

The peanut allergy hysteria narrative says that I can't eat peanuts on a plane or in a classroom with somebody who's allergic because the mere odor of peanuts might kill them. If there is any shred of truth to that narrative (which I seriously doubt), then perhaps trace peanut dust in a home from adults eating crunchy peanut-based snacks is enough early exposure to inhibit an allergic reaction.

My uncle doesn't topple over dead from the smell of peanuts, but he can't be in the house while peanut butter cookies are baking or he will get a bad/dangerous reaction. I suppose there's likely people with worse allergies than him.

You mean from exposure to other kids?

My guess is through breast milk - which I was wondering about with the study as well; does it make a difference for breastfed babies whether their moms eat a lot of peanuts?

Anecdotal: a pregnant woman ate a lot of the stuff (something similar to Bamba) when pregnant, and I mean a lot. The child was diagnosed with peanut allergy when 1 y.o.

Solution? Peanut microdosing, increasing dose progressively, in few months the allergy was gone.

Anecdote from my partner: Allergies come and go, they're not necessarily permanent even if you don't treat them.

Since no one really knows what causes peanut allergies, it isn’t surprising they come and go without much insight into why.

Mom, dad, siblings. Anyone snacking on it will have it on their faces, finger tips. It'll get on the counters and floor. And find its way on a bottle nipple, blankets, sheets, fingers, etc.

N=1 disclaimer but this also happened for me with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups for my peanut allergy, soft boiled eggs for my raw egg yolk allergy, and shrimp based broths for my shrimp allergy.

Unfortunately it has not yet worked for tree nuts or bivalves but perhaps someday a switch will flip inside me.

There's a snack here in Fiji that matches what you describe, called Peanut Ruffs:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22peanut+ruffs%22

I wish I could compare the ingredients.

I always joke to new parents that they should adopt this strategy. Glad to see I was right!

Why does it have to be a solid? I mean you can introduce very small amounts in their milk from any age, which should work the same?

Target sells Bambas in the USA. We bought it to feed our infant for the same reasons you mentioned.

Maybe all the allergic infants died and didn't make it into the study.

Considering peanut allergies are ~1:50 - 1:200, that would be a lot of dead infants and I think that would show up in stats and news.

There can of course be other factors going on, as the comparison is between different countries.

Now, the infant death rate in Israel seems to actually lower by almost half of the US (Iḿ seeing 5.4 per 1000 for the US, vs 2.2 for Israel).

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ISR/israel/infant-mort...

https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternalinfanthealth/...

I have eaten Bamba. My analysis is that they're pretty good.

was this research funded by the maker of Bamba?

Probably ok to eat a little to avoid peanut allergy, but be careful about eating too much poly-unsaturated fatty acids. They do a lot of long-term damage.

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