Peanut Butter Love

By Jo Ann LeQuang

Last year I broke up with peanut butter, which proved to be a mistake. This humble albeit calorie-dense food is actually a pretty reasonable health food. Before I go any further, peanut butter is not a health food when you eat more than a cup of it at one sitting. It is also not healthful if you use it as a dip for Hershey bars. In fact, it is probably not a health food if you eat spoonfuls of it from the jar for no reason at all while standing in front of the refrigerator. But it can be a healthful food choice. And despite the fact that peanut butter is kid stuff, it takes a mature person to really get the health benefits from peanut butter.

Jo Ann LeQuang runs the site EnduranceWalker.com that can help couch potatoes become former-couch-potatoes.

Nutty Brothers

Peanut butter has to be eaten in moderation, but it can definitely bulk up simple foods like bread, crackers, or oatmeal (just stir it in—it’s like a peanut-butter-oatmeal cookies). Two tablespoons can give your meal a protein boost and an appetite-quenching shot of fat all with just 3.3 grams of saturated fat and 12.3 grams of unsaturated fat. However, this requires the maturity to stop your serving at two tablespoons. Per sitting, not per mouthful. According to the Harvard Heart Letter, people who regularly consume nuts, including peanuts, are less likely to develop heart disease of type II diabetes than people who rarely or never eat nuts. This speaks well about peanut butter and its nutty brothers, but remember that people who eat buckets of peanut butter wind up obese and not so healthy.