 Both the pistachio principle and the fecal excretion theory were put to the test recently by studying the effects of peanut processing on body weight. Let's feed a bunch of people a half cup of peanuts every day for a month, and another group will feed the same amount of nuts, but will grind them into peanut butter first. So half cup of peanuts worth of peanuts versus peanut butter. And that was added on top of whatever else they were eating in their regular diet. So calorie-wise, at the end of the month they should have put on a few pounds. Well as we saw before in the whole nut peanut group, that just didn't happen. But that's why we have the peanut butter group, right? Not a lot of shelling or crunching necessary with peanut butter, and the cell walls of the peanuts were all ground up, all the oil released and made available for absorption. And they didn't go extra chunky, this was smooth peanut butter. So if the reason people don't gain weight on nuts is because of all that chewing or fecal fat loss, the prediction would be that although the whole nut group may not pile on the pounds, the peanut butter group definitely would. But they didn't. Neither group gained the expected weight. The plot thickens. Next we'll explore the dietary compensation theory.