A La Bamba

Bamba snack has been around in Israel since the 60’s. You’ll spot it’s recognizable packaging in any supermarket or makolet (milk bar/convenience store) around town. For those of you that are unfamiliar with the notorious “Bamba Snack” – it is essentially peanut-butter flavoured puffed corn. It claims to be free from any cholesterol, preservatives, food colouring and enriched with several vitamins. Sound healthy? Lets see what this peanut-flavoured snack is really all about…

A little bit of history…

Despite its humble appearance (refer to pictorial below), Bamba snack makes up 25% of the Israeli snack market. It was first manufactured by the Osem corporation in 1964 as a cheese flavoured snack, and moved over to a peanut butter snack 2 years later. Other manufacturing companies have tried to come up with similar products (e.g. “Shush” and “Parpar”), but none have reached the mouths of as many children and adults alike, as Bamba. Other more recent flavours that have come out include, strawberry (useful for anyone allergic to peanuts), chalva filled and nougat filled. If anyone is interested there is a Bamba house in Holon, where you can learn anything and everything about the snack (tours are free).

A spot of nutrition...

Ok, granted – as advertised, it is free from preservatives, food colouring and cholesterol. But so is a lot of other snacks, take natural peanuts for example. Being that Bamba is only 49% peanuts, you’re better off having them plain.

Added vitamins? Fair enough, but we shouldn’t be confusing foods that naturally contain vitamins compared to added vitamins. Vitamins and minerals are meant to be eaten as part of a whole food, along with all the other nutrients that the food contains. If we want to encourage eating a more nutritious diet, we should be encouraging foods that are naturally high in nutrients, rather than a peanut puff with some added nutrition. The little Bamba baby on the packaging specifically targets the product to children – we shouldn’t be confusing the little ones of our generation with mixed nutrition messages.

This comes along with the fact that the product is still high in fat and energy – in 100g of Bamba (a small bag is 25g), there are 544 calories (or 2277 kJ), which is about ¼ of the amount of calories an adult should have in a day, and 35g of fat.  

On the plus side, compared to other packaged snacks – like potato chips and Bissli, I would probably place Bamba a little higher on the scale. The other bonus that proponents of the product like to argue, is that Israeli children appear to have less peanut allergies because of they are more exposed to peanuts (i.e. Bamba) at a younger age. This is according to the opinion, that the early introduction of peanuts to infants can prevent the development of peanut allergies because the body is able to develop a tolerance to the peanut protein. One specific study found that Jewish children in the UK were 10 times as likely to develop a peanut allergy compared to Jewish children in Israel.