CrossFit Athletic Group

Who's Deez?

Deez, my friends, are peanuts:

Planters is the brand here (2/$5 at Value Center for anyone interested in deez particular nuts).

The ingredients are peanuts and, just as a caution, it contains peanuts. While it's usually good practice to follow the If It's Got a Food Label Then it's Not Food standard, having the nutritional information listed here actually gives us a good chance to compare products that claim to be peanuts.

This is peanut butter protein powder from Mrs. Van:

The ingredients are the exact same as the Planters jar: peanuts. But something doesn't add up. Look at the difference in ratio of fat, carbs, and "protein." If you crushed up all the peanuts in the Planters jar and then took two scoops from the powdery bits, you'd end up with "protein," carb, and fat numbers that are roughly the same ratio of what you see on that label. But on Mrs. Van's powder the carbs are up, "protein" is way up, and fat is way down - which would lead me to believe that either these are peanuts from the Barry Bonds Sports Performance Labs, or there is more going on here than what is listed on the back.

Now, let's check out this peanut butter from Kroger:

Hey, how bout that! Lines up pretty well according to the statistics.

But like any good basketball fan should know, it helps understanding to think a few layers past the stats...

The root word of "natural" is nature. And a substance like this is nowhere to be found anywhere in nature. This is how the term "process" came to be when referring to food; something that happens between nature and our eating/drinking. For example, when a cow is killed, we don't just eat the cow right on the spot, it needs to be cooked; that is a process. If we didn't want the meat plain, but wanted some flavor to it, more processes would be added to turn the thing into ground beef and then into a delicious cheeseburger.

If you pick peanuts from nature, I'd bet they would turn out a lot like the ones in the Planters jar once you take them out of the shell (a process). If you then sprinkled them with salt and mushed them together... there is no freaking way it would ooze like something from a nacho cheese machine.

The first point, ironically, in the No Context post was about the importance of providing context, and whether these choices are wins or losses are very dependent on 1) who is eating this and 2) what circumstances surrounded it. But when not context-dependent is the fact that it will be very helpful to your health if you are working towards a day where peanut butter powder and peanut butter are considered losses for a meal.