Is Peanut Butter Healthy?

I had Food Detectives on in the background on the television last night, when one slot caught my ear!  Is peanut butter healthy? 

The Food Detectives took to the streets with two baskets and a handful of food and they asked passers by to put the foods into one of the two baskets: Junk Food, or Healthy Food. They then looked at the choices people made.

I wasn’t really watching it, except it caught my eye as they were discussing whether peanut butter should go into the healthy basket, or the junk food basket.  The answer turned out to be the healthy basket.  Now, I always knew that “peanut butter is good for you because it contains peanuts” – and I have a jar here.  But I also also knew that “peanut butter has many calories, so go easy!”.

What the programme discussed, though, is that the peanut butter goes into the healthy basket because it’s not “empty calories”.  It’s quite high in calories, but as it’s stuffed full of important minerals etc it’s actually a “healthy option”.  Ears pricked up!  Peanut butter’s so easy to eat and cook with, I needed to hear this bit….

In the next breath they were saying that peanut butter + toasted bread = superfood status almost!  Apparently (any science went whoosh over my head), the combination of what the peanut butter gives you and what the bread gives you is a perfect blend of “things you should be eating”.  So, in short, my brain registered one simple fact “Peanut butter on toast is better for you than toast with your regular spread on it”.

I figured that if peanut butter on toast is “good for you” and it’s tasty and affordable, then I should immediately switch from eating so much toast/spread and opt for peanut butter instead! Yay!

But, this morning I was #toastfail – I had no bread, but I did have crumpets.  So, breakfast today’s been peanut butter on a crumpet – I’m sure the peanut butter must be better for me than my usual processed spread…. so I probably get a brownie point.  Later on I discovered I’d got two muffins in the freezer, so the next day I toasted a muffin and topped it with peanut butter (see photo!).

Eating healthily is too hard, too complex, really in depth, most of the time: “Peanut butter + toast = Better than toast + spread” is the limit of my ability to absorb all that sciencey information…. so you can expect a LOT more peanut butter in my future recipes!

(Kitchen Hacks) Tip for spreading peanut butter on crumpets: Don’t use a knife, use a teaspoon, then use the back of the teaspoon to spread the peanut butter around.

Menu Cost: 

I had just one crumpet, from Lidl’s pack of six “Fluffy crumpets”, at 37p, so that’s about £0.06.  The peanut butter’s the cheapskate Sainsbury’s Basics Peanut Butter, 65p for a 340 gram jar, I only used one teaspoon of it, so, at a guess, it’s got to be £0.03.  So the cost of eating a “healthy” (ignore the crumpet please!) breakfast was just £0.09!  Very frugal.

Eat as a snack, or as a breakfast… or, sometimes, I might have two crumpets with peanut butter, which counts as “a main meal” here 🙂