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What’s rich in monosaturated fats, high on biotin, an excellent source of vitamin E, low on bad cholesterol and aids weight loss? Let’s give it a standing ovation, Peanut butter! And you thought we were talking about something leafy and boring! Yes, peanut butter is good for health. But can you eat it every day, in buckets, that too? Not unless you want to live long and strong. Here’s looking at why peanut butter is healthy, and how you can incorporate it in your daily diet for maximum benefits.

When Dr. John Kellogg invented peanut butter in 1890, as a healthy protein substitute for his patients with no teeth, he mustn’t have imagined that this health food would become much tainted as unhealthy and fattening. Perhaps the problems cropped up in the 1920s when American manufacturers came along and added several preservatives and hydrogenated oils to make longer lasting peanut butter.

Still, there are enough options out there. The trick would be to pick a brand that doesn’t have transfat in it. Also, if you can find brands that have no preservatives, more power to you. Transfats, hydrogenated oils and preservatives are the evil in anything, not just peanut butter, and avoiding them is as simple as stepping across to the health food sections in malls or general stores. There are quite a few peanut butter brands that offer 100% natural peanut butter. We’re not marketing any brands here, so you’ll have to do your own leg work, but also look out for brands that mix peanut butter with other high performance foods like chocolate and sesame. Or you could just make it at home. We’ve decided to try a peanut butter recipe and there’ll be more about that in a later post.

The parameters worth checking out on the back of each brand’s bottle are: monosaturated fats (good), hydrogenated oils (bad), sodium (the lesser the better), natural ingredients other than peanuts (wheat germ, flax seeds, other fiber content: Good), fat content (not necessarily evil if it’s high, unless you insist on eating more than 2 tablespoons at a time), and protein content (Apart from protein from peanuts, some brands come with egg whites mixed in. I personally am not too fond of these, but whatever crunches your bread!).

Notice I didn’t talk about checking out the calories. For good reason – yes, peanut butter is high on calories, most bottles will even tell you how many calories per tablespoon you will be consuming, but that doesn’t make peanut butter an evil food. If you include just two tablespoons of peanut butter in a calorie balanced diet, you receive all the daily nutrients your body needs in a day and it curbs hunger. This is because peanut butter has good calories (even I balked when I read that such a category existed!). Studies have shown that eating peanut butter leads to good BMI, an indicator of the fact that it boosts metabolism and works like anything good that comes at a premium. You eat something high on calories, but it helps you burn even more. That sounds like a fair bargain to me!