If you go and look in your pantry right now, you’ll probably find a jar of peanut butter. Though it comes in many flavours and consistencies in this day and age, did you know that peanut butter has a history that dates back to the Aztec culture in South America?
While the peanut butter the Aztecs made was a little rougher around the edges, they enjoyed it as a food source for hundreds of years. They took roasted peanuts, which were plentiful in the area, and mashed them up into a rough paste. In the time since then, peanut butter has had a colourful innovation history that has included such well-known names as Dr John Harvey Kellogg, amongst others, who marketed his peanut paste as a food substitute for people without teeth because it was easier to ingest. Who knows what he would think of today’s peanut butter consistencies and flavours?
Some Odd Things about Peanut Butter
Given its long history, peanut butter is associated with some really interesting facts and figures. Consider the following bits of trivia:
- The peanut is an underground legume and not actually a nut.
- Over 500 individual peanuts are needed to make a single jar of peanut butter.
- In the US, peanut butter is so popular that over the course of a single year, every person eats about three pounds of it! That translates to 700 million pounds of peanut butter eaten each year.
- Former US Presidents Jimmy Carter and Thomas Jefferson were actually peanut farmers.
- Over half of the peanuts grown in the US go into making peanut butter.
If you’re already convinced of how great peanut butter is, you will like this peanut butter in Singapore. If you need more convincing, why not consider the health benefits?
Health Benefits of Peanut Butter
Peanut butter might have a long history and some cool trivia associated with it, but did you also know that it has certain specific health benefits? You can eat your next peanut butter sandwich in peace knowing the following cool health benefits:
- Peanuts contain a lot of protein. Protein is used by our bodies for a number of jobs, including muscle and tissue repair. If you ingest two tablespoons of peanut butter, you can expect to benefit from seven grams of protein. This means that having peanut butter on toast for your breakfast is actually beneficial. Not only that, but eating foods filled with protein makes you feel full for longer periods of time, which is great for those wanting to lose or maintain weight.
- There’s growing evidence that saturated fats are not the evil that we once thought they were, and so foods that contain saturated fats are perhaps not quite as unhealthy for us as we once thought. The truth is that our bodies actually need a certain amount of fat each day to function optimally, so the saturated fats in peanut butter may in fact be good for us.
- Peanut butter also contains plenty of potassium, which is great for our bodies and counters the effects of too much salt and sodium in our diets.
Eat Well and Eat Peanut Butter
Though we’ve often had a strange relationship with peanut butter, thinking it to be yet another junk food, it turns out that this popular food has a long history of human use and has some good health benefits. The best advice is to eat it in moderation and enjoy your peanut butter on toast!
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