Smucker’s Peanut Butter: What’s In It?
This post kicks off a new feature that highlights some of the ingredients in processed foods commonly served in restaurants and sold in grocery stores. These posts will appear in the new What’s In It? section.
What’s in Smucker’s Peanut Butter? The main ingredients are roasted peanuts and SUGAR. How much sugar is not clear, but its more than 2 percent of the total. High quality peanut butter is made with just roasted peanuts and salt, but not this paste from Smucker’s.
Wikipedia describes peanut butter as a food paste. Who wants some food paste?
Peanut butter requires some oil. Smucker’s had to add oil because they removed the peanut oil that had been present in the peanuts to sell separately. How about that? No peanut oil in the peanut butter, but highly processed oils from soybeans and rapeseed plants. Rapeseed and soybean oil are cheap. Rapeseed oil is more commonly known as canola oil. Canola oil has gotten some bad press, so calling it rapeseed oil provokes less anxiety. Of course, soybean oil is no prize either.
Mono- and diacylglycerols are common food additives used to blend together certain ingredients, such as oil and water, which would not otherwise blend well. I don’t like eating things that sound more like a science experiment than food, but hey, that’s me.
I don’t usually eat legumes or legume pastes (peanuts are legumes), but ate what was convenient while on vacation and that included this very peanut butter on bagels at breakfast. I don’t usually eat dairy, grains, or added sugars either, but did on this trip. I suffered a mildly upset stomach throughout my vacation and am pretty sure my gastrointestinal distress was a direct result of the processed foods I ate.
If you are curious about why peanut butter and beans in general do not rank as good food, read the Whole9′s Legume Manifesto…
