Peanut…Peanut Butter, (what the) helly?

I was at a friend’s house on the weekend and he had a jar of ‘peanuts only’ peanut butter (I don’t remember the brand name but it was fairly unique to one of his neighbourhood grocery stores). I’ve tried other ‘natural’, ‘no sugar added’, ‘peanuts only’ peanut butters and they usually really translate to ‘no flavour’ or ‘stick in your craw’ peanut butter. This new one was actually decent. I bought a few bottles — I have peanut butter and jam sandwiches everyday and I thought this would be a good way to decrease the amount of sugar that I inhale on a daily basis.

To my surprise, when I did the side-by-side nutrional information comparison with my usual sugar-full peanut butter, the differences in total sugars and calories were minimal (the sugar-full butter had 1 gram more sugar per 30 gram serving than the peanuts only). The peanuts-only actually had more calories per serving. So I ask, what up?

The sugar-full peanut butter has icing sugar as its second ingredient so I figured that it must have a ton of sugar but maybe not. I went to the USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference to pit straight peanuts against my sugar-full peanut butter. (I would have used a Canadian site but I couldn’t find one as easily). It came up with a slightly different answer, with the sugar-full peanut butter having double the sugar but still only approx. 1 gram more per 30 gram serving.

So, maybe all those people who think that peanut butter is crazy high in sugar are just plain wrong. The notion that the ingredient list can be used to estimate quantitative amounts is erroneous. The icing sugar is second on the list of ingredients not because there is tons of it in the peanut butter but rather because it is more (albeit potentially only a smidgen more) than the number three ingredient.

Rise up, peanut butter lovers who are being forced into eating flavour-less, craw-clogging, natural, organic, never-seen-anything-but-peanut peanut butter and eat the delicious-ness that is slightly-sweetened peanut butter. Mm-mm good!