Peanut Butter

J'Accuse

One of my big questions recently has been:

Why, if PUFAs bad, didn't the first six months of the Heart Attack Diet do anything?

Generally speaking I ate a lot less processed and commercially prepared food during the pandemic.

My weight stayed perfectly stable at 93kg throughout the pandemic, and my general health was excellent. I was optimistic and energetic throughout, and I would have said I was fine throughout 2020, apart from the tiny detail of taking a boatload of semi-illicitly purchased thyroid drugs every day to stave off death.

After the pandemic was over, I went back to my usual eating-out ways, and over the next year, I got more and more tired, and I managed to gain 4kg in a year, the fastest weight gain of my life. Things were worse than they had been before.

At that point, just before Christmas 2022, I renounced all polyunsaturated evil, and with it all processed food.

And I felt a lot better after that, probably because I accidentally gave up sulphites, but the weight gain continued at roughly the same rate for the next six months.

And that's a puzzle. If PUFAs bad, why didn't giving up PUFAs do anything for my weight gain until my first go at ex150ish in June 2023?

Even more puzzling, why did my thyroid dose start to drop (the best measure I've got for metabolic recovery) just before ex150ish?

Staring hard at those graphs, it's just about possible to believe that my weight had at least plateaued just before ex150ish as well. It's confounded by a visit home, which we know has a weight-gaining effect, possibly protein-related.

Now ex150ish is good.

But it is not so good that it works backwards in time.

I think this is the answer:

https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/whole-earth-peanut-butter--crunchy-454g

I've always kind of liked peanut butter, but I've never actually eaten much of it. It's often a bit oily and gross. It never tastes like how it should.

When the coronavirus first started boiling out of China, I was imagining bad scenarios. I knew that it was unlikely to kill me, but I also knew that it was likely to make me, and everybody else, very ill, all at the same time.

I was imagining interruptions to the food supply. A large number of police incapacitated at the same time. Civil unrest, riots, that sort of thing.

And so I started stocking up, imagining a couple of months spent in the wilderness where I'd have to rely on my own stores.

I went looking for food that would be high in calories, keep well, and contain protein. Stuff that wouldn't go off for months but which would supply my basic nutritional needs.

Lots of tinned beef and carbohydrates, obviously, but also peanut butter looked like a good thing to have around in large quantities. So I bought loads.

And not the usual crap.

I found Whole Earth Peanut Butter, which is absolutely admirable.

Just peanuts, palm oil, and salt.

Totally natural, traditional food, and it tastes delicious.

I never did have to live on my supplies; the food supply was never interrupted and there never was any unrest or period of shortages in England.

But when the pandemic was safely over, I started to eat my way through all the stored food.

And I found I really loved Whole Earth Peanut Butter, and I when I'd eaten my way through all the stored stuff, I bought more.

It became a staple. I started buying it in vast 1kg buckets. Fairly regularly.

https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/whole-earth-crunchy-peanut-butter-1kg

And when first I renounced all polyunsaturated evil, I didn't notice peanut butter.

What's not to like? Palm oil is pretty innocent, unsaturated fat-wise. And nuts are a very traditional food. What could be wrong with nuts?

I was mainly interested in getting rid of everything that contained rapeseed oil, sunflower oil, that sort of thing. The obvious unnatural things that have been introduced to the food supply over the last seventy years.

I don't remember the first time I noticed the actual nutritional label on my lovely wholesome jars of peanut butter.

Fat 54.3g (of which saturates 7.9g) per 100g

Oops.

Palm oil's not so bad.

Peanuts themselves. Peanuts are not nuts. They are seeds.

I do remember sadly throwing the jar away, thinking "That's the first thing I've given up that I'll miss."

So that was probably at some point during the first six months, and maybe later rather than earlier, since I remember being surprised by it, rather than it being part of the general process of noticing where the oilz-of-evil were lurking.

I think that for most of the first six months of all this, I was cutting out polyunsaturated fats from rapeseed oil and replacing them with more polyunsaturated fats from peanuts.

Oops.

Also, I'm now starting to believe that it's something to do with a combination of PUFAs and protein.

Fat 54.3g of which saturates 7.9g

Protein 27.7g

Oops.

If you think PUFAs are bad, and you think protein is also somehow involved in the badness, then peanut butter starts to look like a very bad actor indeed.

Ooops.

So now I have to explain why on earth I felt so much better immediately I gave up PUFAs, and immediately became convinced that it was a good thing to do.

So much better that I decided I was keeping this diet even if it turned me into a barrage balloon.

Maybe the sulphites. They made a big difference.