Trans Fat in Peanut Butter

[Guest guest]

Okay, I've been ranting a bit lately. But I do value this forum and

I appreciate the contributions people make to this list. So rather

than continuing my rant, I like to offer the gist of a post I

attempted to make a few weeks ago.

I, like many people, had assumed that any food with a label listing

partially hydrogenated vegeatable oil was a food to avoid, because

it must be high in unhealthy trans fat. However, it appears that

the mere presence of partially hydrogenated oil on a nutrition label

is not a reliable indication that the food is high in trans fat.

Specifically, conventional peanut butters containing partially

hydrogenated vegetable oil apparently do not have high or unhealthy

levels of trans fat. It may still be wise to avoid such peanut

butter for other reasons--they usually contain sugar--but the trans

fat should not be a concern. I was surprised to learn this.

The cite referenced immediately below is an industry cite, but it

references an FDA study.

See http://www.peanut-institute.org/070303_PR.html

or http://tinyurl.com/5nwb6

Also,

http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/nov01/sci1101.htm

or

http://tinyurl.com/6vzbb

Peanut Butter Free of Trans Fats

Suggestions that this popular lunchbox staple contains a kind of fat

that increases risk of cardiovascular disease now appear unfounded.

Researchers had 11 brands of peanut butter—including store brands

and " natural " brands—tested in a commercial laboratory against paste

made from freshly prepared roasted peanuts. The lab found no

detectable trans fats in any of the samples, with a detection limit

of 0.01 percent of the sample weight.

This means that a 32-gram serving of any of the 11 brands could

contain from zero to a little over three-thousandths (0.0032) of a

gram of trans fats without being detected.

While current regulations don't require food labels to disclose

trans fat levels, they do require disclosure of saturated fat levels

at or above five-tenths (0.5) of a gram—a level that's 156 times

higher than this study's detection limit for trans fats.

Peanut butter has plenty of unsaturated fatty acids, with oleic acid

the most abundant. It's thought to be a beneficial fat and, in these

analyses, ranged from 19 percent in one of the store brands to 27

percent in one of the natural-type spreads.

Palmitic acid, the most abundant saturated fatty acid, weighed in at

about 5 percent among all brands tested.