Avoid Reduced-Fat Peanut Butter: The Fatty Stuff Is Actually Healthier

Peanut butter's great, and a reduced-fat option may sound even better if you're trying to watch your weight, but dietitian Tamara Duker, writing for US News, explains that the fattier stuff is actually a healthier choice:

Americans love peanut butter, but it has a lot of calories due to its high fat content. Wouldn't it be great, some clever marketer once thought, if we could tweak a peanut butter to reduce its fat content? The devil, unfortunately, is in the details: Reduced-fat peanut butter, it turns out, has no fewer calories than regular peanut butter. Why? Because when you remove all that fat, it needs to be replaced with something to take up space and maintain the creamy product texture. So companies replaced it with corn starches and sugars.

The result is not only a product with the same amount of calories, but a less favorable nutritional profile. Reduced-fat peanut butter has fewer of peanuts' heart-healthy monounsaturated fats and more of the refined carbs and sugar that spike blood sugar. It's a nutritionally bankrupt swap if ever there was one. This is a product that simply should not exist.

So just buy the regular stuff if you love peanut butter or, better yet, make your own.

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Photo by Brent Hofacker (Shutterstock).