fats

I did a little research about fats recently, and by “a little research”, I mean “talked with a friend who’s a doctor, and Clauded a bit”, coming to the following conclusions:

Fat can be saturated, polyunsaturated, monounsaturated, or trans. Polyunsaturated includes omega-3 and omega-6 (and a few others like CLA).
Saturated fat: Bad, Actually²
Polyunsaturated fat: a mixed bag. In theory, omega-3 and omega-6 are both good, and ideally you’d get a ratio of 4:1 omega-6 to omega-3. In practice, everything has a lot of omega 6 and nothing has much omega-3 so “get more omega-3” is usually in the right direction.³
Monounsaturated fat: generally pretty good?
Trans fat: just the fuckin' worst, everyone agrees. Luckily, they’re not really in nut butter, so I’m leaving them out of this discussion.

Based on this, peanut butter feels not terribly great to eat a ton of. In 100g of peanuts you get ~49g of fat, including 7g saturated, 10g omega-6, 0g omega-3, and 26g monounsaturated.⁴ Can we increase the omega-3 and/or decrease the saturated? (Also, can it taste even better?)

let’s make nut butter

For the omega-3, I found that almost nothing nutty has omega-3. Exceptions include walnuts (4:1 omega-6 to 3 ratio), hemp seeds (3:1), flax seeds (1:3!) and chia seeds (also 1:3!)

For saturated fat, I wanted to look into almonds and walnuts too: about half as much saturated fat as peanuts.

For taste: let’s just try them all!

So I bought a bunch of nuts and ground them up. Here are some things I found:

The blender actually grinds better than the food processor⁵. It’s harder to clean, though.
Peanuts are among the best tasting nuts. Cashews and pistachios are good too. Almonds make the whole thing taste kinda dry/woody, and walnuts taste bitter.
So if walnuts are out, then flax seeds are our only source left of omega-3. But ground flax seeds make the whole nut butter kind of gummy. Better off just using flax oil.
Flax tastes kinda bitter. I wonder if omega-3 fats just taste bitter. Bummer if so. At any rate, you can usually hide up to about 1.5 tsp per 100g of nuts; above that, you start tasting the bitterness more.
Luckily, though, that’s a good amount of omega-3! 100g peanuts + 1.5 tsp flax oil gets you to an omega 6-3 ratio of 2.4, which is plenty low enough.
I didn’t get much taste benefit from mixing nuts. There may be a delicious brew out there. I didn’t find it.

So:

The Best

that I’ve found is just 100g peanuts, 100g cashews, and 3t flax oil.

Upsides: almost 4 grams of omega-3 per 100g. If you had 2 Tbsp (30g) of this, that gets you 1.2g omega-3, almost the RDA. The omega 6-3 ratio is 2.4, so (assuming the rest of your diet is more than 4:1) you’re moving in the right direction. Tastes very good; you almost don’t notice the flax.

Downsides: doesn’t help with the saturated fat; about 8.5g per 100g, 1g more than regular peanut butter. Cost is not awesome at $7.80/lb.

the second-best

well look, you can improve on both of those downsides by just making peanut butter + flax oil. 100g peanuts + 1 tsp flax oil is super cheap and high omega-3. Hell, just mix in flax oil to premade PB. But I can’t write a whole blog post and have that be the punchline.

future work

chia seeds. They’re weird little guys. I tried to grind them once but had more luck just making chia pudding. Chia pudding’s good though, and pretty easy.
hemp seeds. At 3:1, they don’t really pull the omega 6-3 ratio down too much, but they seem to be more neutral tasting than flax.
pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, pecans, and macademia nuts. All widely available and potentially tasty.
toasting vs not: I tried this with walnuts, to not much effect taste-wise. I don’t know about the effect on the fats. I would imagine that the omega-3s might stick around more in a less-cooked form, but I’m just guessing
is this omega-3 even good enough? Something about how ALA (the omega-3 in flax) is not as important as DHA/EPA (the omega-3s in fish) so maybe this is all a red herring. And maybe I should just eat more red herring.

spreadsheet

Here! Have at it. If you come up with a better nut butter, let me know!

I think I first noticed this when studying abroad in The Netherlands. Peanut butter seems to be a very US centric food. Supposedly NL is the best place in Europe for PB, but even there, I had a hard time finding enough of it reliably. Which leads me to think: the rest of the world must be an absolute PB wasteland! (shudder) ↩︎
I guess this is the common wisdom. But in the past couple decades of paleo, keto, anti-seed-oil, etc, I feel like I’ve read a lot of stuff arguing that saturated fats, like in butter and coconut milk, are actually not so bad. But I guess that’s all fringe stuff and saturated fats are actually generally bad. ↩︎
I remember even Michael Pollan, in the Omnivore’s Dilemma or something, writing about how most attempts to reduce food to numbers are a waste of time… but actually the omega-6-to-3 ratio is really important, and it matches up well with “we used to eat a lot of leaves and were healthy, now we eat a lot of grains/seeds and are less healthy.” ↩︎
I don’t know why these don’t add up to 49g. Claude says it’s because they’re different measures: first you measure total fats, then you measure each subtype, so it doesn’t guarantee they’ll match. Still, we’re 6g off. This bothers me but not enough to research more. ↩︎
this might be because it’s a Vitamix. I love Vitamix. It does one job well. ↩︎

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