Peanut butter and health, what's the deal ?

My name is Hanne van Meel, MSc Nutrition and Health. In this blog I will tell you more about the (nutritional) substances in peanut butter and explain what the effects are on your health.

What's in peanut butter?

Peanut butter, does it fit into a healthy diet? To answer this question, it is important to first look at the ingredients of your peanut butter. In fact, the more peanuts the better! In addition to peanuts, the peanut butter that you can find in the supermarket often also has oil, sugar and/or salt added. This makes this peanut butter less healthy. The oil that is often used in peanut butter is palm oil . Palm oil consists of half saturated fat - which is bad for your health. In addition, the production of palm oil is often not sustainable. Fortunately, there are more and more types of peanut butter that consist mainly or even entirely of peanuts! The Natural peanut butter from De Pindakaaswinkel consists of 97% peanuts. A small amount of coconut oil and salt has been added. The types with a flavor contain at least 88% peanuts.

Peanuts

Although peanuts are considered nuts, they are botanically legumes. The reason that peanuts are still considered nuts is because they are very similar in taste and composition. Peanuts consist of about 50% fat (1). They also contain a lot of protein – about 25%. The remaining 25% are carbohydrates (and a little bit of water), of which about one third is fiber (1). Unlike both other legumes and nuts, peanuts grow underground – which is why they are also called groundnuts.

Fats

Fats are essential for your body to function properly. In addition to providing your body with energy, fats are also necessary for your body to absorb sufficient amounts of the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K. In addition, fatty acids are building blocks of body cells and play an important role in communication between cells. Fats in our diet contain fatty acids that can be saturated or unsaturated. The ratio between these fatty acids varies per food. Peanuts consist largely of unsaturated fatty acids (± 85%) (1). The majority of these are the monounsaturated fatty acid oleic acid – which is also mainly what olive oil consists of. In addition to oleic acid, peanuts also contain the essential polyunsaturated fatty acid linoleic acid . Your body cannot produce this fatty acid itself and must therefore obtain it from your diet. Essential fatty acids are necessary for the proper functioning of the brain, eyes and skin and for the normal growth and development of children (5). The Health Council has determined on the basis of a large number of studies that replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease (2). This seems to be mainly because replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat causes LDL cholesterol to drop (3). That is why the Nutrition Center recommends that you make sure that the largest part of your fat intake consists of unsaturated fat (4). Due to the large amount of unsaturated fatty acids, peanut butter is an excellent product for this!

Proteins

Peanuts – and therefore also peanut butter – are a good source of protein. They contain more protein than other nuts (and legumes). However, peanuts – like all plant products – are an incomplete source of protein (6). This means that they do not contain enough of all essential amino acids – the building blocks of proteins. This is usually the case with animal products. If you have a (mainly) plant-based diet, you can still get enough of all important amino acids by varying your plant-based protein sources. For example, by eating peanut butter on a sandwich, you get a more complete profile of amino acids (7,8).

Fibres

Peanuts are a good source of fiber. Fiber is a carbohydrate that cannot be digested by our intestines. Fiber helps keep your intestines healthy. There are many different types of fiber, all of which are positive for our health in a different way. It is therefore important to eat products with different types of fiber. Peanuts mainly contain fermentable fiber (9). Fermentable means that the fiber can be broken down by bacteria in the large intestine. Butyrate is created during the fermentation of fiber from peanuts. Butyrate appears to have many positive health effects - both in our intestines and in the rest of our body (10). The Nutrition Center recommends eating about 30 to 40 grams of fiber per day (11). A tablespoon of Natural peanut butter from De Pindakaaswinkel (20 grams) contains 1.4 grams of fiber. If you spread this spoonful of peanut butter on a whole wheat sandwich, you immediately have 3.7 grams of fiber (1)!

Vitamins

Peanuts contain mainly B vitamins and vitamin E (1). B vitamins are important for the proper functioning of your metabolism. They are necessary for releasing energy from your food. In addition, the individual B vitamins have many other important functions in your body. Vitamin E has an important function as an antioxidant. Antioxidants can neutralize free radicals – substances that can damage cells and tissues in your body.

Minerals

Peanuts also contain many minerals. Magnesium and zinc are well represented, for example. For example, a handful of nuts (25 grams) contains about 17% of the daily recommendation for magnesium and 10% of the daily recommendation for zinc (1,12). Furthermore, peanuts also contain potassium, calcium, phosphorus, iron, copper, selenium and iodine (1).

Bioactive substances

Bioactive compounds are substances that provide a certain health-promoting effect in your body, but are not necessary for your body to function properly – which is the case for vitamins and minerals. There are many positive health effects linked to bioactive compounds, but much is still unclear. Some bioactive compounds are already clear. Peanuts contain several types of bioactive compounds, including phytosterols (13). Phytosterols have been shown to lower blood cholesterol levels (14). Another bioactive compound in peanuts that has been studied extensively is resveratrol . You may already be familiar with this compound, as it is the compound that gave red wine its name. This is because resveratrol is found in abundance in the skin of red grapes. To get the amounts of resveratrol that studies show positive effects, you would have to drink a lot of wine – several bottles per day (15,16). And that does more harm than good. Whether resveratrol in peanuts provides additional positive health effects is still unclear, but it certainly can't do any harm (17)! It is possible that it is the combination of multiple bioactive substances in foods - and therefore also in peanuts - that together provide positive health effects (15).

Peanut allergy

Despite the fact that peanuts contain many healthy substances, eating peanuts can also cause problems. Peanuts contain proteins that can trigger an allergic reaction – these are called allergens. In an allergic reaction, your body sees these allergens as harmful, causing your immune system to react. This includes the release of histamine in your body, which causes allergic symptoms. Symptoms of a peanut allergy include skin rash, gastrointestinal problems, respiratory problems and in severe cases anaphylactic shock (18). In anaphylactic shock, so much histamine is released that your body can end up in a life-threatening situation. Peanuts, together with tree nuts, are the biggest causes of food allergy-related anaphylactic shock (18). The severity of the symptoms can vary per person and per exposure (18). A peanut allergy probably occurs in approximately 0.5% to 2.5% of the population (19). Peanut allergies usually start in childhood – between the ages of 14 and 24 months – but they can also develop later in life (18). You can reduce the risk of developing a peanut allergy by introducing peanuts to your children at a young age. Read how here !

Lectins

Peanuts contain a type of lectin called peanut agglutinin. Lectins are proteins that occur in almost all plants. Plants use these proteins to protect themselves from external dangers, such as fungi and insects (20). Legumes, grains and potatoes in particular contain a lot of lectins. Lectins can bind to carbohydrates. Not much is known about the effects of lectins in our bodies, but they seem to have both positive and negative effects (21). The effects also differ per type of lectin. For example, lectins from raw kidney beans can cause stomach and intestinal complaints and, in the long term, even damage your intestines and kidneys (22). Most lectins become harmless when heated (22). By cooking them, you can safely eat legumes. Lectins in peanuts are an exception to this - they remain largely present even after heating and can end up in your bloodstream (23). Little is known about the effects of these on our health. They are therefore unlikely to pose a major problem (24).

Aflatoxin

Peanuts are susceptible to infection with the fungi Aspergillus flavus and Aspergillus parasiticus , which can produce the toxic and carcinogenic substance aflatoxin (25). This substance is largely heat-resistant, which means it can still be present in processed products such as peanut butter (26). Fortunately, the presence of aflatoxin in products is well monitored in the Netherlands. Maximum levels of aflatoxin in products have been established via the European Commission (27). The Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA) ensures that these standards are complied with. This means that the risk of ingesting harmful amounts of aflatoxin is small.

Does peanut butter fit into a healthy diet?

The Health Council concluded in the 2015 Guidelines for a Healthy Diet that it has been convincingly demonstrated that the consumption of nuts – including peanuts – reduces LDL cholesterol and thus the risk of heart disease (28). Many studies have also been published since 2015 in which a possible link has been described between the daily consumption of nuts and/or peanuts and a lower overall risk of mortality (29-31). This link is less clear for peanut butter (30,32). This may be because sugar, saturated fat and/or salt are often added to peanut butter, which reduces the positive health effect of peanuts. A small handful of nuts and/or peanuts per day seems to be sufficient for the above-mentioned effects. The Health Council recommends eating at least 15 grams of unsalted nuts per day – peanut butter also counts towards this (28). In the Netherlands, we eat an average of 3 grams of unsalted nuts and nut butter per day. Only 4% of the population eats at least the recommended 15 grams per day. That can be better! (33) All in all, peanut butter – preferably with the highest possible percentage of peanuts – fits perfectly into a healthy diet. So score your tasty and healthy peanut butter jars here ! If you have any questions about this blog or about other topics related to nutrition and health, you can always contact me via info@metisfoodconsultancy.nl or www.metisfoodconsultancy.nl .

Sources

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