Tuesday, May 1, 2012

May Commitment to Health

In my house we eat a lot of peanut butter!  Peanut butter is a great go to snack or lunch.  While is it a little high in calories, peanut butter is still a very healthy food.  It is high in fat, however, most of the fat is monounsaturated which had been shown to lower "bad cholesterol".  It also contains polyunsaturated fat which has been shown to raise "good cholesterol".  Peanut butter is high in protein, dietary fiber and vitamin E.  (Info from Peanut Butter.org, go there to read more about the health benefits.)

So my commitment is to switch to natural peanut butter.  True natural peanut butter only has salt added, I chose to switch to "no - stir" natural peanut butter.  This means it has a couple more ingredients to keep the oils and solids from separating.

Ingredients of the traditional peanut butter that I had been buying:
roasted peanuts, sugar, molasses, fully hydrogenated vegetable oils (rapeseed, cottonseed and soybean) and salt.

Seriously ... YIKES!!  Fully hydrogenated oils!!  Livestrong has a great article about hydrogenated oils.


Ingredient list for my new brand of "no stir" natural peanut butter:
roasted peanuts, sugar, palm oil, salt

WOW!  I know what all of those ingredients are and I know that they are not dangerous!  I will definitely feel better about feeding this to my kids!

It is a little more pricey than traditional peanut butter, but I personally feel it is worth it...the price difference is minimal.

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