So, this post is dedicated to peanut butter. I've been eating a LOT of peanut butter lately. And by lately, I mean for the past year. I'm not entirely sure how I made it over 3 decades without a peanut butter obsession because, gosh, it's so darn good! I think my mistake was thinking of peanut butter as a partner to jelly when in reality peanut butter is so much better without jelly- good with toast, apples, chocolate ice cream or just on a spoon solo, peanut butter is GREAT.
Over the past few weeks, I've started to worry that my peanut butter consumption might be unhealthy. So you can imagine my happy surprise when I found an article in the Archives of Internal Medicine journal titled "Nut Consumption and Blood Lipid Levels". The article summarized 25 different trials with the subjects eating different amounts and different kinds of nuts. The conclusion was that the people who ate more nuts (of virtually any kind including peanuts!) had lower cholesterol (specifically LDL, the "bad" cholesterol). This was particularly true for people with lower BMI (body mass index, low=thin, high=fat). Perfect! I'll just tell myself that peanut butter has enough peanuts in it to help me keep my cholesterol low. Right now both my LDL and HDL are in the 60s so that's pretty good, but hey lower is better for the LDL! (Let's just hope I don't eat so much peanut butter to make me no longer in the lower BMI category! I better keep running marathons!)
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