Blog

Going Natural with Peanut Butter

in The Too Busy to Diet Blog on November 6, 2013

Written by Jennifer Martin, Dietetic Student at University of Illinois at Chicago 

Something is wrong with this peanut butter, I thought to myself when I opened a jar of natural peanut butter for my first time. I was in high school, and my mom brought it home from the grocery store that day. Instead of the thick, creamy concoction that I was used to seeing in the jar, I was looking at an oily, liquid mess (which I later learned is the separation of oils from the peanuts). Plus, why should I have to stir the peanut butter myself AND keep it in the fridge? Bring me the Skippy, already!

Years later, I am a natural nut butter convert. It only took eating a few servings of the peanut butter that my mom brought home to make me change my taste preferences. Peanuts taste great on their own after all, right? If you go to a baseball game in the summer, you see people eating plain peanuts (even if the shells are salted, the peanuts on the inside are still just peanuts). So if peanuts are so great and taste delicious, then why add junk to them? It only makes it taste less natural.

To demonstrate the differences between natural and “regular” peanut butter, I pulled my husband’s jar of Skippy Super Crunchy peanut butter out of the pantry and set it beside my own jar of Trader Joe’s Creamy Unsalted natural peanut butter.

His ingredients: roasted peanuts, sugar, hydrogenated vegetable oils, and salt.

My ingredient: dry roasted peanuts

While my jar has equal amounts of fat and calories per serving, it’s slightly lower in saturated fat, sugar, salt (mine has 0 g) and is higher in fiber. Even though his peanut butter doesn’t have a crazy amount of added ingredients, you can still see how avoiding them ramps up nutritional value. I’ve seen nut butters at the grocery store with an entire paragraph of ingredients that I couldn’t pronounce. That’s never a good sign!

If you eat nut butter regularly and want to get better nutrition from it without doing much, take a look at your ingredients on the jar. How many ingredients are there? Do you know what they are? How many attempts does it take you to say the name of each ingredient aloud? If you’re struggling to get through the list (which is likely with so many products in our grocery stores), then pick up a nut butter with fewer ingredients on your next trip. The closer you get to one or two ingredients, the better. This means that you are putting fewer preservatives and added salt and sugar into your body. That’s a good thing!

Also remember that eating natural peanut butter (or any nut butter) is still high in fat and calories. In my jar from Trader Joe’s, 2 tablespoons contain 16 grams of fat and 190 calories. This is normal. Even if nuts are loaded with nutrients, it’s always important to watch your serving sizes.  Peanut butter and jelly is also fine; just don’t go overboard with your servings and aim for whole grain breads with 3 or more servings of fiber.

I do hope that you consider making the change to natural nut butter. If you don’t live near a Trader Joe’s, Smucker’s now makes a natural one with just peanuts and salt. I also learned today that you don’t have to stir your nut butter as much if you store your jar upside-down before opening it. I plan on doing this, although stirring takes all of one minute (if you don’t spill the oil).

Enjoy your PB, friends!