Suggestions that peanut butter contains a kind of fat that increases risk of cardiovascular disease now appear unfounded.

Suggestions that peanut butter contains a kind of fat that increases risk of cardiovascular disease now appear unfounded. Researchers had 11 brands of peanut butter, including store brands and natural brands, tested in a commercial laboratory against paste made from freshly prepared roasted peanuts. The lab found no detectable trans fats in any of the samples, with a detection limit of 0.01% of the sample weight. This means that a 32-g serving of any of the 11 brands could contain from zero to a little over 0.0032 g of trans fats without being detected. While current regulations don't require food labels to disclose trans fat levels, they do require disclosure of saturated fat levels at or above 0.5 g, a level that's 156 times higher than this study's detection limit for trans fats. Peanut butter has plenty of unsaturated fatty acids, with oleic acid the most abundant. It's thought to be a beneficial fat and, in these analyses, ranged from 19% in one of the store brands to 27% in one of the natural-type spreads. Palmitic acid, the most abundant saturated fatty acid, weighed in at about 5% among all brands tested. Contact: Timothy Sanders, USDA-ARS Market Quality and Handling Research Unit, Box 7624, 129 Schaub Hall, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695. Phone: [phone]. Fax: [phone]. Email: [e-mail].