this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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A few people are in here saying a pound or two a week is an unreasonable amount of peanut butter.
But when you buy peanut butter it comes in a 1-2 pound jar. If it's your main source of protein, your favorite comfort food, or you have a poverty pantry, then I could totally see how you might think that one jar a week isn't too bad.
Two pounds of peanut butter is about 6000 calories, or three days of energy for the average person. It shouldn't be the main staple in your diet, as OPs doctor will attest, but it doesn't seem strictly unreasonable.
I wonder how gourmet or homemade "nothing but peanut" butter compares to something like Kraft that's loaded with sugar. Probably still not super great, but hey, maybe it's better. Or maybe it's worse. Eat a variety if you can.
Eating peanuts or peanut butter for protein is weird because it's wayyyy higher in fat. Don't eat it for protein, it's a fat source really.
Y'know, that's an interesting point.
I blame our nutritional education. I grew up with the Food Pyramid (now debunked), and peanut butter would be considered a "meat alternative" which I think people conflate with being a source of protein.
That's not how it was taught. Maybe that's how you learned it. Peanut butter and peanuts were on the bottom row with vegetables, not a meat sub.
https://peanut-institute.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/pyramid-med.jpg
That's a very different food pyramid from the one that I was taught at least. The 90s/2000s food pyramid made no distinction between different kinds of meats but did make a distinction between grains, fruits, and veggies, with grains as the base of the pyramid.
Your food guide looks different than mine. Notably, yours has a distinction between meat, poultry, and seafood where mine are all lumped in as one category that also includes legumes.
For what it's worth, I believe this guide has been fully discredited. There was a considerable amount of lobbying to present certain foods prominently.
That's the one I'm familiar with. Funny what happens when a country and province is hugely invested in dairy farming and then their kids are taught in schools to consume large amounts of dairy to be healthy.
I agree, but at least nuts are high in unsaturated fats, which have some rather solid clinical backing as being healthy. Obviously still energy-dense, and if nuts are used a primary protein source it will likely be difficult to stay within a restricted caloric budget.
E.g. if you want to follow the government recommendation and have 20% of your calories come from protein, peanuts will fall short as only 18% of their calories are sourced from protein (79% from fat). 349 grams of peanuts (about 3/4 of a pound) has 2000 calories and 91 grams of protein - with 175 grams of fat.
I've always heard that peanuts were kind of the last option you'd want to pick among nuts, specifically because they're so high in saturated fats (about 20% of the fat content). They're not bad per se, but there are much better options.
Still, they're a great source of added protein and unsaturated fats, but like you said, don't rely on them as your primary source.
You are definitely better of snacking on peanuts than, say, Doritos. It's not that they are a bad food, they just don't have a great macro balance if they are the major component of a diet. From this unvetted comparison they don't seem to be too bad compared to other nuts.
If someone really wanted to get most of their calories from peanuts, they would probably want to supplement with something like pea protein powder and some high-fiber greens (or even beans). This would allow for keeping carbs relatively low while having a more even balance between fat and protein intake. Not quite keto, but not the typical high-carb western diet.
This is the first post I've ever heard that peanuts can be poisonous if overeaten, but I know that most tree nuts are. Almonds and Brazil Nuts are high in selenium and can straight up kill you. As few as 6 Brazil Nuts may be enough. Cashews are also slightly poisonous because the fruit they come from is.
Peanut butter and bacon!
This issue can occur when eating one food excessively for long periods. I distinctly recall this being covered in pre- college health classes.
A common urban legend was the girl who only ate carrots and turned orange.
I can confirm this is a real thing. When I was a kid my step-mother went on this fad diet that involved drinking carrot juice every day. It was this whole production where she bought a juicer and I remember multiple large bags of carrots coming in the house. There was always leftover carrot pulp in the trash, etc. Anyways she went wild with it for a time and sure enough her skin started turning slightly orange, mostly along her forearms where the skin was thin.
That’s when the carrot juice stopped.
So yeah she wasn’t an Oompa Loompa but it was definitely a visible change.
My mom did the same thing. Sometime in the very late 80's to early 90s.
Colloidal silver?
A friend of mine spoke to this man on a train ride. He lived in the town we went to college in.
He looks like a townie
A 200Lb adult needs a minimum of 140g of protein daily to remain healthy.
A single serving of peanut butter has 190 Calories, and only 7g of protein.
If that 200Lb adult was getting just half of their protein from peanut butter, they would be consuming 1,900 calories in the process. Even if they are active enough to justify that caloric intake, they would still be consuming 160g of fat, which is double the daily recommended amount. It's the nutritional equivalent of drinking a 2/3 cup portion of cooking oil every day.
Tl;Dr: Do not make peanut butter your main source of protein.
wp:Peanut
The standard recommendation is about 0.8g per kilogram of body weight. So 200 lbs is 91 kg, which corresponds with 73g.
There's some more recent advocacy for more protein, especially for active or older people, but that's talking about more than just the minimum requirements to be healthy, and more towards optimizing for performance.