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.
If it’s your main source of protein.
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.
A 200Lb adult needs a minimum of 140g of protein daily to remain healthy.
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.
With their high protein concentration, peanuts are used to help fight malnutrition. Plumpy Nut, MANA Nutrition,[67] and Medika Mamba[68] are high-protein, high-energy, and high-nutrient peanut-based pastes developed to be used as a therapeutic food to aid in famine relief. The World Health Organization, UNICEF, Project Peanut Butter, and Doctors Without Borders have used these products to help save malnourished children in developing countries.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
A friend of mine spoke to this man on a train ride. He lived in the town we went to college in.
That stuff tastes so vile, I can’t even handle one spoon. Two pounds? Jesus.
A pound of peanut butter per week sounds insane but apparently it’s only like 2 cups and I feel like that’s an edible amount. It’s a lot but if I really got a hankering for some PB I could do that. But then after a week I would be over it. I feel bad for this person though that apparently they think eating nothing but PB is healthy. A human body needs a variety of different foods and nutrients and evidently eating nothing but peanut butter isn’t that.
Was putting less than that per week in my morning weight-gain breakfast shakes. Worked for a couple of months until the kidney stones put an end to that. Could never gain on carbs alone.
Of course not, protein is very literally what gains are made of.
It occurs to me that you might have just been talking about gaining fat, which is also more complicated nutritionally than you might expect. Especially to do responsibly.
Glycogen also makes up a good amount of muscle mass. But there was more in the shake than just pb and carbs. I had calculated a combination of macros though all those notes are long gone now. A 1500 cal shake over the course of a morning plus what amounts to 3500+ calories per day, all pre planned did not foresee the kidney stones peanut butter and cocoa would produce.
Same thing happens to me; I’ll get a massive craving for peanut butter and easily consume an entire family-sized jar in a week. And just like you I’ll get over it and go months without.
I wonder what causes this? Not enough protein in my diet?
You probably have plenty of protein in your diet. Requirements aren’t that high for it. They’re not a complete protein either but easily become one when paired with stuff most of us eat anyway.
They’re pretty decent for b vitamins and things like copper (which is used for iron absorption).
Long story short you probably just like PB. I mean it’s nice stuff but easy to get sick of.
Oxalic acid is a normal part of the metabolic process. Your body literally creates it during digestion. Avoiding all oxalic acid intake is a nutrition myth and is basically impossible anyway. Fruits contain it, vegetables contain it, grains contain it. You eat it constantly. This person was already severely unhealthy if they gave themselves NAFLD and kidney stones. More likely the crap peanut butter OP was eating was full of preservatives and icing sugar and OP is probably chronically dehydrated.
As a gym rat and bicyclist i was having health issues. No drugs or alcohol. Lots of supplements.
I went oxalate free on a zero carb diet for several years and it fixed my auto immune disorder. I lost 30 pounds of muscle in the process because of a loss in appetite. I slowly readded foods into my diet. Turned out that I couldn’t handle salicylates in large amounts. It’s in most plants as well. 3% of the population shares my intolerance. We can’t eat spices or herbs.
All humans have individual variances in our ability to process plant toxins. There’s a reason why some people are more prone to kidney stones than others. It doesn’t mean someone is unhealthy.
“A pound or two each week”
Thats your problem right there. The next step up from peanut butter, in terms of calories (particularly fats) per kg is actual butter or lard. Its about 50% fat.
I imagine the rest is second hand regurgitation of info they dont really understand.
The word “liver” doesn’t appear in the Wikipedia article.
As for oxalates:
Several plant foods such as the root and/or leaves of spinach, rhubarb, and buckwheat are high in oxalic acid and can contribute to the formation of kidney stones in some individuals. Other oxalate-rich plants include fat hen (“lamb’s quarters”), sorrel, and several Oxalis species (also sometimes called sorrels). The root and/or leaves of rhubarb and buckwheat are high in oxalic acid.[14] Other edible plants with significant concentrations of oxalate include, in decreasing order, star fruit (carambola), black pepper, parsley, poppy seed, amaranth, chard, beets, cocoa, chocolate, most nuts, most berries, fishtail palms, New Zealand spinach (Tetragonia tetragonioides), and beans.[citation needed] Leaves of the tea plant (Camellia sinensis) contain among the greatest measured concentrations of oxalic acid relative to other plants. However, the drink derived by infusion in hot water typically contains only low to moderate amounts of oxalic acid due to the small mass of leaves used for brewing.[citation needed]
but no mention of peanuts in the main or talk page.
The doctor might be wrong.
I suspect peanut falls under the “most nuts” part, right after cocoa and chocolate
