If you are one of those millions of overweight Americans, you may have heard of the Amazing Peanut Butter Diet, but are you sure about where this diet came from? Are you skeptical about its ability to really help people lose weight? Isn?t peanut butter high in fat? Is it really healthy to focus on one particular type of ?miracle food? when dieting? These are the types of questions that should be addressed when contemplating any diet, but especially the Amazing Peanut Butter Diet.
It is certainly true that Americans love peanut butter, whether it is the fancy kinds you get from little gourmet shops that tout their ?all-natural? goodness or the mass-produced kinds that we all grew up with. So let?s address some of the above questions about the Amazing Peanut Butter Diet.
First of all, the Amazing Peanut Butter Diet was introduced to America via ?Prevention? magazine. It was so popular, the publishers of the magazine created a whole book about it, which you can order from Amazon or pick up off the shelf at your local bookstore. ?Prevention? has a good reputation, and as a result, the Amazing Peanut Butter Diet has a good reputation, as well.
So, the first question is answered and now we need to address the second. Can the Amazing Peanut Butter Diet really help people lose weight? Well, believe it or not, there are some studies that show that the Amazing Peanut butter Diet did actually help people lose weight.
A control-group study was done in Boston; half the overweight participants were given a low-fat diet. The other half were given about 35% of their total calories as monounsaturated fats ? the kind found in peanut butter, olive oil, and the like. Everything else remained the same ? i.e., both groups ate the same number of calories.
For women, the number of calories was 1200 per day. So, what happened? Both groups lost about the same amount of weight, but the upside (for peanut butter lovers and peanut farmers) is that the folks who got to eat the creamy goodness stuck to their diet better than the other half of participants did. Although this seems like quite good news at first glance, it is probably important to realize that 1200 calories is hardly any calories. Just about any woman who only eats 1200 calories per day is going to lose weight.
I guess if you absolutely love peanut butter, this would be a great plan for you, as you get to eat a limited amount of it every day. If, however, you can take it or leave it, maybe the Amazing Peanut Butter Diet is not right for you.
Okay, so the Amazing Peanut Butter Diet has some sound backing, and folks did have good results with it in a study, but now it is time to address the third issue: fat content. If you thought peanut butter was high in fat, you are right. However, some experts claim that the type of fat found in peanut butter is actually good for you. Peanut butter has monounsaturated fat. So do avocadoes.
Could this diet just as easily be called the Amazing Avocado Diet for people who prefer the green fruit to the smashed nuts? With 1200 calories and anything with monounsaturated fats, would the results be the same? More people probably prefer peanut butter, so it is my guess that is the reason for choosing peanut butter over avocadoes was purely for marketing.
