 is peanut butter healthy? Seems like a silly question to the average person. Yes, of course, peanut butter is healthy and modern conventional wisdom will always guide you that peanut butter is one of the best foods you can eat. And it's kind of funny that people think eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on whole grain bread is actually healthy. But once you understand nutrition, omega fatty acid ratios, the vitamin and mineral components that make a food healthy, as well as the negative concerns of what agrochemicals, how has the food been processed? Peanut butter is actually one of the worst things you can incorporate into your diet. And yeah, there's omega cis concerns, there's lack of nutrient concerns, but we have to talk about the mold and the toxins and all of the chemicals that are sprayed on this crop and that grow on the crop as it's processed. You know, imagine you have this giant storage facility full of peanuts that were wet in the field. They're growing molds on them. They have all types of bacteria, rats, fecal matter, a lot of negative things on this peanut butter. And all you really have to do is have a slightly sensitive gut to understand how bad some of these peanut products can be. You know, have one little thing fried in peanut oil and your face will break out with cystic acne, just a tiny bit. So although this jar of peanut butter might seem relatively harmless, the amount of chemicals, bugs, insects, mold, mycotoxins, negative things that will cause oxidative stress, stress your liver, stress your body, cause leaky gut, lead to inflammation. And that's outside of the face value, nutrition on the peanut butter product. You know, the omega six is crazy. It has a very unnatural omega three to omega six ratio. So whenever you skew that natural ratio in your body, we see inflammation. You know, the average person might not get acne from eating a little bit of omega six peanut butter, but someone like myself, even if I just have some duck or some chicken or alter my omega six ratio slightly, I get massive amounts of inflammation in my body. You know, can you say peanut butter is healthy from a survival perspective? Will it keep you alive? Is it calorically dense? Absolutely. But by no means is it something we should be consuming. The vitamin content off the top of my head, I'm assuming there's some B vitamins, again, not in like a super available animal form. There's a decent amount of minerals as well. So, you know, you can't discount the mineral value that you're getting from this food, but you know, how many anti-nutrients are in there? How much phytic acid? How much oxalates? You know, are you getting calories from this? Yes. Is it something that's absolutely horrendous to include in your diet once in a while? I don't think it's the end of the world. You know, I definitely wouldn't go for conventional peanut butter. There's definitely some options you can choose that are reasonable. And even better is if you start choosing nuts that favor omega three over omega six. So let's take a look at some of the options that we have here. So the video is titled peanut butter, but you know, we're gonna cover all of the other nut butters, seed butters as well. Unfortunately, most of them are not acceptable. And if we look at the ingredient list, you know, this looks good, dry roasted peanuts and salt. But, you know, how high were these heated? How oxidized are the fats? You know, it's not organic. So there's definitely more pesticide and agrochemical concerns. So this is definitely not what we're looking for. But most of the organic peanut butters that I've seen have some additives in them. Now this is actually good. Normally you'll see like sugar, palm oil, a bunch of other things put in here, but this is organic dry roasted peanuts. So if you were just gonna buy this and have this, you know, a couple of times a month, give it to your kids, you know, make sure you eat some fish, some other point in the week. It's not the end of the world. You know, by no means would I start consuming this by the tablespoon. If you're gonna do that, we definitely have to look at some other options. So you see this one has what I said, you know, it has the palm oil and the sea salt. So depending on the texture, what they're going for, you know, there might be some ingredients in here besides peanuts that you wanna look out for. You know, so what about something like cashew butter or almond butter? You know, the mineral profile and vitamin content might vary somewhat between these butters and the omega-3 to omega-6 ratio might be better in some of these, but for the most part, all nuts and seeds are incredibly high omega-6 and should not be consumed in high amounts. The thing you will notice though is with almond butters, they tend to only have almonds added to them. So, you know, as with the peanut butter, you know, if you can find a decent organic almond butter, then, you know, I wouldn't discount that as something you can have a couple of times a month as a treat. You know, so they add some flavors and stuff here, but, you know, organic is kind of a requirement. You know, organic removes some of the negative agrochemicals that are used and we can't really justify purchasing something that's not organic if there is an organic option available. And again, you really wanna watch out because most of these peanut butters will have the palm oil, the cane sugar and the sea salt and honestly, you know, is palm oil and cane sugar that bad of an ingredient to add here in small amounts? No, you know, honestly, if you enjoy this creamy peanut butter spread way more than this one that just has peanuts in it, you know, go for that, that's fine. If you're gonna, you know, you're dying a little bit and have something that's not ideal, go for that. Sunflower butters, tahini butters, all incredibly high in omega-6 still. All of these things are still incredibly high in omega-6. You know, something like sunflower seeds or tahini, it might be less mycotoxins, less agrochemicals depending on how they're grown, but, you know, overarching thing is we're not really trying to consume these in our diet ideally and if we do occasionally as a treat in small amounts. That's where these can kind of come in, I guess. I mean, I'm not a fan of stuff like this and you're spending $1.50 per, what is this, like two ounces, one ounce of a seed butter. These are actually all raw. So this is a raw pecan butter, this is a raw walnut butter and they sell these in the jar too but they're very, very expensive. So these are tizana organic products. This is what I would go for if you want to have the least inflammatory thing. You know, is heating the nuts and the seeds of bathing? You know, no, I think it reduces the anti-nutrient content, it changes the composition. I would see how you feel on a heated nut product versus a raw nut product. Obviously in the raw ones the anti-nutrient content's going to be higher. It might not digest as efficiently, it might not be as good of a source of calories but it's definitely less inflammatory. Coconut butter and like coconut mana and coconut oil, I would not categorize it in the nuts and seeds. I think coconut is, you know, perfectly healthy and safe to consume. So, you know, this has mostly saturated fat, the omega-3 to omega-6 isn't off that much. You know, granted, it doesn't really offer that much from a vitamin and mineral perspective, it's mostly calories. I would definitely approve of the coconut products. These though, you know, walnut butter, almond butter, cashew butter. Well, first of all, cashews can't be raw because they have to heat them to process them. So I don't know what they technically mean by raw cashew butter. Maybe it's only been heated to a certain temperature raw walnut butter with cashews. Again, expensive stuff, you really want to splurge on it and try it and enjoy it. That's up to you, I think there's better options. Yes, I mean, you could go for, this one's a little cheaper, raw organic almond butter. Basically, go organic, see if you feel better eating raw or pasteurized products. And I don't see macadamia nut butter here, and it tends to be really expensive. You can find the macadamia nut butter online though. I actually threw a couple bags of chestnut from my cart that my family's gonna try. I've never had these before. So there's only two nuts that have a reasonable omega-3 to omega-6 ratio to my knowledge. One of those that you can usually find is macadamia nuts, but they're like $20, $25 a pound. These chestnuts were actually like $3 a bag. So they're still not that cheap, but you know, my family's gonna try these out and see how they like them. So if you do see chestnuts, if you do see macadamia nuts, definitely pick those out. I have a couple jars of macadamia nut butter on the counter at my house that my sister and my mother have been like dipping apples in. So if you can go online, you can find raw macadamia nut butter, raw macadamia nuts. You know, again, the few times I've tried macadamia nuts, I didn't necessarily feel good consuming them. I'm just saying that if you're going to incorporate nuts or seeds or anything in your diet, from what I've researched, macadamia nuts and chestnuts have the most favorable omega-3 to omega-6 ratio to the point where you could even consume them on a daily basis and not notice too much of a negative impact in your diet. If your kids really love peanut butter, if your kids really like almond butter, walnut butter, pecans, you know, it's sprinkling a few nuts and seeds on your food going to harm you. No, I mean, depending on if it's organic or not, how it's processed, it might cause small amounts of oxidative stress. And if you're in an altered metabolic state, if you're really unhealthy, if you have a lot of inflammation, it might be an issue in the big picture. But what we're mainly focusing on here is, you know, can you incorporate these foods into your diet on a consistent basis in much larger amounts? And oh, when I said those two nuts, the macadamia nuts and the chestnuts, I also meant to include coconut. So coconut, macadamia nut, chestnut, very favorable omega-fatty acid ratios. You know, from a vitamin and mineral perspective, we're not getting much. You know, from a gut bacteria, microbiome perspective, we're not getting much. They are incredibly calorically dense foods. They're enjoyable. They can add flavor, texture, richness to a lot of dishes. So this is definitely something you guys can explore and above everything, you know, see how you feel consuming it. The people that are sensitive to foods, you know, tend to be sensitive to certain things. But hopefully these options I'm suggesting to you guys can, you know, remove most of the guesswork and give you an understanding of how you can incorporate these types of foods safely into your diet. I mean, if you want to get really crazy with it, you can start, you know, buying, you know, raw organic unshelled macadamia nuts. You could look online to find like biodynamic, wild quality nuts. You know, there's a lot of really expensive high end stuff you can buy that's not necessarily accessible at your local supermarket. But it's tough, you know, this type of information is never really going to be exposed to the general public on a large scale because it's such a commodity product. Now, you know, can peanuts be made in a healthy way? Yeah, I mean something like high oleic peanut oil that's organic if there wasn't a mycotoxin or inflammatory concern. You know, it's not necessarily the worst thing to consume or cook with, it's just with all these other options that are so much healthier and less inflammatory and more nutritious and they taste better. It really makes you question why bother incorporating something like peanut butter into your diet. Now, of course there are some specific things that we didn't cover. There might be certain anti-nutrients and peanuts that I didn't talk about. There might be certain chemical compounds and peanuts, phytoestrogens, whatever those things are. Over-arching concerns are the omega-6, are the mycotoxins, are the inflammation. Anti-nutrients, I don't really want to put a precedent on them because a big purpose of humans consuming food is survival. And anti-nutrients are specific to the food that you're consuming. You know, anti-nutrients and peanuts, even if they're inhibiting some of the mineral content it's not taking minerals away from your body. Yeah, there were groups of cavemen that if they ate too many chestnuts that weren't prepared properly they would run into issues. But we are able to prepare nuts, seeds and grains in a way to reduce the anti-nutrient content. So, you know, at face value, the way most plant foods are being consumed right now anti-nutrients are definitely an issue. But when you go organic, when you prepare them properly, when you have a large quantity of animal foods in your diet, anti-nutrients aren't really a concern. You know, if you're worried so much about magnesium being bound up to oxalates, I mean, you should probably be supplementing magnesium anyway due to soil depletion. You know, there's not a lot of minerals that you need to take or get in your diet. It's not difficult. So, I just really want to say and emphasize that anti-nutrients are not the predominant issue with this food and many other plant foods. Although they do rear their ugly head, when you start doing unrealistic things, you know, if you start drinking kale shakes, then the amount of gore hydrogen is going to be an issue. So, thank you guys for joining me. I think I've covered everything I wanted to talk about in regards to peanut butter, nuts and seeds. If you guys have any further questions or any input, please let me know. I mean, honestly, like if your kids really love peanut butter, chocolate, those types of treats, go organic, have them a couple of times a month. It's not the end of the world, but you really want to understand that if you're suffering from a lot of health issues and you have problems, this is definitely not a food that you want to incorporate into your diet anytime soon. See you guys for tomorrow's video.