this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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A few people are in here saying a pound or two a week is an unreasonable amount of peanut butter.
But when you buy peanut butter it comes in a 1-2 pound jar. If it's your main source of protein, your favorite comfort food, or you have a poverty pantry, then I could totally see how you might think that one jar a week isn't too bad.
Two pounds of peanut butter is about 6000 calories, or three days of energy for the average person. It shouldn't be the main staple in your diet, as OPs doctor will attest, but it doesn't seem strictly unreasonable.
I wonder how gourmet or homemade "nothing but peanut" butter compares to something like Kraft that's loaded with sugar. Probably still not super great, but hey, maybe it's better. Or maybe it's worse. Eat a variety if you can.
A 200Lb adult needs a minimum of 140g of protein daily to remain healthy.
A single serving of peanut butter has 190 Calories, and only 7g of protein.
If that 200Lb adult was getting just half of their protein from peanut butter, they would be consuming 1,900 calories in the process. Even if they are active enough to justify that caloric intake, they would still be consuming 160g of fat, which is double the daily recommended amount. It's the nutritional equivalent of drinking a 2/3 cup portion of cooking oil every day.
Tl;Dr: Do not make peanut butter your main source of protein.
The standard recommendation is about 0.8g per kilogram of body weight. So 200 lbs is 91 kg, which corresponds with 73g.
There's some more recent advocacy for more protein, especially for active or older people, but that's talking about more than just the minimum requirements to be healthy, and more towards optimizing for performance.