Roasted Peanuts Are More Likely to Trigger an Allergic Reaction

According to a recent paper in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, people who live in the Western World are more likely to be allergic to peanuts than those living in East Asia.

As it turns out, this might not be because Westerners don't have what it takes to handle their nutty candy bars. It could be because of slight differences in the chemical makeup of the peanuts folks around the world like to eat.

Long story short, an international team of researchers say that, having carried out a series of experiments on laboratory mice, they found that, when compared to raw peanuts, dry roasted ones are more likely to trigger an allergic reaction.

This is because the process of roasting causes very specific chemical changes that the body's immune system seems not to like all that much and consequently tends to react negatively towards.

In their paper, the scientists behind this research project say that, in East Asia, raw, boiled or fried peanuts are the most popular. Folks in the Western world, on the other hand, prefer roasted and dry-roasted peanuts.

If the information obtained while carrying out experiments on mice also holds true in the case of people, this could explain why cases of allergic reactions to peanuts are more common among Westerners, EurekAlert explains.

“Our results in mice suggest that dry roasted peanuts may be more likely to lead to peanut allergy than raw peanuts: the dry roasting causes a chemical modification of peanut proteins that appears to activate the immune system against future exposure to peanuts,” said Dr Amin Moghaddam.

It is believed that, by pinning down these exact chemical modifications and figuring out a way to keep them from taking place during the roasting process, it might be possible to make roasted peanuts a wee safer to eat.