I tried to ask this in another thread. But it was hijacked by people talking about allergies. Leaving aside nut allergies, are nuts and peanut butter healthy foods to eat?
If you want to talk about nut allergies, look up the other thread.
There seems to be a perception that nuts and peanut butter are bad for your health. I thought they were, in general, healthy foods.
My understanding is nuts have a high calorie density but also have nutrients so it’s not “empty” calories like pop. If you go around eating jars of peanut butter or cans of cashews you’ll get fat, but they’re healthy in reasonable quanties like a peanut butter sandwich or a handful of cashews or two.
Note that commercial peanut butter, particularly in the US, tends to have a lot of sugar added, boosting the caloric content significantly.
Nuts like walnuts are high in Essential Fatty Acids, which some people think are good for you.
Nuts are not unhealthy in the way, say, twinkies are unhealthy. They do provide nutrition. However, overeating is unhealthy, because if you overeat you gain weight, and it’s unhealthy to be overweight. Unfortunately, it’s really easy to overeat nuts. About 75% of the calories in nuts come from fat; the other 25% is protein. There is also almost no water or air. This means that a visually small portion is really high in calories. I mean, I could probably eat more nut calories in a sitting than I could eat twinkie calories, honestly. And since people think of nuts as “healthy”, they are more likely to not worry about eating too many.
Peanuts are not nuts. But some nuts, in limited quantities, have been shown to be healthy. Walnuts and almonds in particular, although there may be other nuts that are good for you, too.
You do note John that our op did not state “nuts like peanuts”, but “nuts and peanut butter” (emphasis mine). Yes, peanuts are a pulse, like lentils. But from a nutritional POV nuts, peanuts, and a variety of seeds are often handled as a group.
DCnDC’s links do a fine job of summarizing the literature. If someone wants a more academic treatment of the subject they can read this review as well:
And this:
In short those who eat the most nuts tend to be the healthiest. Most people who eat the most nuts not only do not tend to overeat them but tend to eat less otherwise and burn more even at rest. Go unsalted though.
High calories aside, I think it’s important to distinguish the types of processing involved. “Natural” peanut butter, the kind where the oil separates, is not the same as most kid-friendly peanut butter that has added emulsifiers and sugar. Years ago, peanut butter labels prominently mentioned hydrogenated vegetable oil as an ingredient, but now that transfats are known to be bad for you, they have either changed the emulsifier or called it something else. I don’t know whether they’ve made it any healthier.
Similarly, nuts that can be eaten raw will not be the same as most canned nuts that are roasted in vegetable oil and then heavily salted.
I used to love raw walnuts, but for whatever reason, in the last couple years there have been more and more of them that look exactly the same as the tasty ones, but taste absolutely terrible, some combination of bitter, rancid, and moldy.
I buy the 3-pound bags at Costco, and I’m to the point where I have to sample a tiny bite of each one before I’ll pop it into my mouth, because instead of having one or two duds per bag, some bags have one or two duds per handful.
Whereas others think that they are essential.
When you get right down to it, they are essentially fatty acids.
Nuts are very healthful. Peanut butter was developed to provide a way to bring a high level of nutrition to those who had bad teeth and couldn’t chew properly or at all.
The only bad thing about nuts, other than if you’re allergic, is they are high in calories, or rather dense. And being extra delicious you over eat them :o)
It takes such a small amount of hydrogenated oil to stop separation that there’s no reason to be concerned that the peanut butter becomes “unhealthy”.
That is great news; it means I can stop using natural PB. Unfortunately, I bought a ton of it a month or so ago when I heard the prices would be going up.