Poison Butter, front view
Pediatricians don’t generally recommend your feeding poison to your children, but a lot of parents do just that every time they spread peanut butter and jelly between slices of bread and feed it to their children. There’s precious little nutritional value whatsoever to the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and we can take apart the ingredients and explain why.
The first reason is TRANS FAT! You need to search the world over for a peanut butter that is free of evil vegetable oils (all of which contain trans fat and oxidized unsaturated fats).
The second reason is SUGAR! Much more deadly than cholesterol, and more vicious than small-particle LDL, we pack sugar in everywhere to make the poisons go down easier. The spike in your insulin levels contributes more than almost any other factor to atherosclerosis, stroke, cancer, and diabetes. Sugar is packed into in the slices of bread (2g), the peanut butter (4g), and the jelly (12g), the equivalent of more than a half can of soda. With a total carbohydrate dose of 61g, subtracting the 9g of good fiber, is 52g of worthless carbs (208 calories). That’s the same as one and a half cans of soda!
The third reason is wheat, which human beings have only been eating for (depending on your race) between 400 years and 8,000 years. That’s more than 1.76 million years of evolution spent without grass in our diets (that’s 0.45% of our time on the planet). Before that time, animals ate the grain since they are evolved to digest it and we aren’t, and then we ate the animal to get the advantage of the vitamins they consumed. Wheat is a poison to our species but for some reason it’s made its appearance at the base of our food pyramid, which was pushed on us by the U.S. Department of Giving Money to Agribusiness. By eating this poison we show the classic symptoms of malnutrition and starvation. We have to mill grains like wheat and throw away the nutrient-dense husks, which we can’t digest, in order to get at the starchy white flour. Add to that the fact that 40% of all processed flours have neurotoxic pesticides in them, you’re better off staying with something that is organic and can be identified as food for humans.
Content of a dose of poison butter
So let’s look specifically at my first claim, that of trans fats. My goal is to get people to read the nutrition labels and to run in fear. This label says there’s less than 2% of hydrogenated cottonseed oil in the peanut butter. If you see the word ‘OIL’ in an ingredient list, you should put the food down and pick up some organic fruit or even a steak instead, because you take your chances with any oil. The pesticides used in the cottonseed are transmitted directly to you in the expeller process, which uses hexane and other industrial solvents to extract every last ounce of oil from the seed. Oils banish the antioxidents and vitamins by separating them from the seed, so you get none of their benefit (if you had been able to digest them properly in the first place). In general, it’s best to consume the whole food rather than its oil. So, eat olives instead of olive oil. Eat peanuts rather than peanut oil, and so on.
But just in case you don’t know what cottonseed oil is, there is a product called Crisco that has been poisoning people for 100 years, and it stands for “Crystallized Cottonseed Oil,” and in this sense Crystallized is a sort of euphemism for “hyrogenated” or in other words, made into a faux-saturated fat, or in other words, a Trans Fat. If the producer chooses to lie on the trans fat part of the label, you can bet that 50% of the weight of the fats are in the trans configuration. So if less than 2% of the peanut butter is cottonseed oil, 1% of the final product is trans fat.
But as I said earlier, you should eat peanuts rather than peanut butter. A dry roasted peanut is 49.66% fat, whereas this peanut butter is 53% fat. So the extra 3.33% is very likely due to the added trans-fat-laden cottonseed oil. It’s an extra 1.1g, of which probably 50% is trans fat. That’s very close to the 0.5g limit over which the producer is required to list that half gram of trans fat on the label. So they squeezed the portion size down to 2 tbsp, exactly what would be needed to sneak a half gram of poison into your diet.
How many tablespoons of peanut butter do you put on a peanut butter sandwich? You should measure. You could be getting a gram of trans fat.
You should consume less than a half gram of trans fat in a week.
The verdict: POISON!