They deserve credit for warning everyone about a situation people might not have realized was dangerous. Damn.
Something doesn't add up to me. That is not a ridiculous amount of peanut butter for one week. We would hear about this more than some random reddit post if it was real.
“I eat relatively healthy”
“Sometimes my only food in the entire day is peanut butter”
I have a niece who is literally obese (>30 BMI) and her mother (also obese, even more so) frequently describes her daughter as a "healthy eater" despite the fact that her diet mainly consists of cake and ice cream, in enormous amounts. She considers it "healthy" because it's all organic from Whole Foods.
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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 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.
My mom did the same thing. Sometime in the very late 80's to early 90s.
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.
Oh my god
I did not know that could happen.
Time to find some other foods to replace my #1 go-to 😟
Fuck
I can happen if you eat a fucking pound or two a week. Do you eat that much in a week as your comfort food?
Yes
Yes I do
I’m boring, I like having meals that I don’t have to think about as options to lean on in the morning. Pb and toast is my default for a low effort, no-brain-power-required breakfast.
During my poverty days I ate that as my main source of calories in the day. At most I’d go through a 1lb jar in about 3 days, so like 2lbs a week back then.
These days I’m eating a plant based diet and have far more variety of foods I put in my face. I still go through a 1lb jar in ~1 week, unless I’m eating oatmeal or something else for breakfast for a stretch.
You know that ‘what’s one food you’d bring to a deserted island to eat forever’ question? My answer was always peanut butter. Have to rethink that now.
I genuinely think I've been eating about a pound a week for a while. 😐 Not amused.
Kidney stones fucking suck too. Note that there are more than just the calcium oxalate kidney stones, but for those ones in particular, other things high in oxalates that you might be eating that are high in oxalates: spinach, chocolate, tea, nuts, sweet potatoes.
So if you're trying to eat healthier, don't fully adjust to eating (breakfast) an oatmeal bake with nuts, peanut butter, and chocolate; (lunch) wraps using a spinach wrap and/or spinach instead of lettuce for the greens in it; and tea instead sodas... Unless you like the idea of Tylenol sized kidney stones.
This happened to me, 11mm kidney stone. It's truly sucks.
As someone who has always had a problem with calcium oxalate stones, I did not know peanut butter is so loaded with oxalates, so this is good information to have.
It'll sound counter intuitive, but one way to avoid problems with oxalates is to consume calcium rich foods with oxalate high foods. For example, a glass of milk (soy milk counts) with a PB&J.
The reason this works is the calcium binds with the oxalate in your stomach and not your liver/kidneys.
For this to work, you have to consume both at the same time.
They cannot be eating relatively healthily if peanut butter is their only food for the whole day lol
I’m shamelessly biased on this topic but I would say nothing but pb is healthier than nothing but ramen. At least that’s what I’m interpreting OP’s opinion on the matter of relatively healthy 😐
Seems like you're good if you keep your peanut butter consumption under a fucking pound or two a week!
The quantity doesn't seem right to me, a normal american peanut butter jar is about 2 pounds. I feel like if the only thing you eat in a day is peanut butter that by itself would be about a half a jar right? Calories would put it at ~1/3 a jar for daily caloric intake but obviously you're going to overshoot if you're eating straight peanut butter. Half a jar in a week just doesn't sound that crazy to me, thats barely over 2 servings/day.
Also peanuts are low in oxalates compared to other nuts. The number I keep finding for a low oxalate diet is 100 mg/day. Apparently 200-300 is a typical amount. The highest number I found is 20mg of oxalate to a tablespoon of PB so 2 pounds a week is only 160mg/day unless I messed up the math.
*I think what happened here is OP is either predisposed to kidney stones and is generalizing the special diet they should be on to everybody else or is just overweight and leaving out that detail since everything I'm reading about NAFLD is that it's caused by obesity not oxalates.
Or they underestimated how much peanut butter they're eating. But that was my thought too, NAFLD is typically caused by obesity, so maybe my hypothesis holds water.
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 of peanut butter is around 2600 calories. A pound of Nutella is about 2400 calories. Honestly not as bad as I thought initially.
1 to 2 pounds a week is 370 to 740 calories per day. Eating that much peanut butter for a week or so wouldn’t be too hard, but keeping that rate up consistently would be tough.
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.
A pound of peanut butter in a week is nothing; a pound of peanut butter a week, every week, on the other hand...
It doesn't sound like they think it's healthy, given that they said they eat it in excess and it's a guilty pleasure.
I didn't realize that too much peanut butter could be dangerous, but I also am confident that I am eating significantly less than 5,300 calories per week in peanut butter / peanuts. If you're churning through 2-3 standard jars of peanut butter a week, that's just absurd.
Natural PB, or Kraft, Skippy, Jif? Cause that sugar shit will kill you.
Also, peanuts are not a nut, they are a legume.
A pound or two a week sounds kind of moderate? I mean it's a lot, but if you like peanut butter? I don't eat nearly that much of it on average, but when I buy a 1 pound jar I usually finish it off in much less than a week. It's just an occasional thing for me though.
Are those oxalates only if the PB is getting spoiled or anything like that?
I remember my grandmother who lived to age 98 told me about an "all-day sucker" - basically fill a spoon in peanut butter, and when it's done, fill it up again. Repeat all day. Can you tell she lived during the depression?
I didn't think much of it as a kid. Thought it was a pretty good idea. Then I learned about food sanitation practices, and reconsidered.
ITT: people underestimating the density of peanut butter
There is nothing unhealthy about peanut butter (when I say that I mean ground peanuts, not the brands with an insane number of additives), but almost anything in extreme quantities can be toxic. Even water.
The human body is meant for variety. It's wild that as much as we've learned about the absolutely insane importance of the gut microbiome it still comes down to "eat your vegetables".
Water intoxication sounds really freakin’ weird at first, but makes sense once you learn a bit more about it.
The only reason I knew peanuts could be bad for your kidneys is watching Dr. Glaucomflecken and seeing his sketch of the nephrologist at Halloween. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAghdVqVJUg
