As a result of certain recent studies, many researchers and experts are now actually recommending that you eat peanut butter as a part of a healthful diet for the reduction of body fat or for maintaining a healthy body weight.  

Still, if you want to lose more weight, then the idea isn’t to simply gorge on as much peanut butter as you can eat.  If you want to use this ingredient successfully as a part of your overall fat loss strategy, then you need to follow a few common sense based rules.

The first point that you should remember is that the research that looked into the use of peanut butter to help people to lose more weight focused on its consumption in the form of a snack, not necessarily as a part of a meal.  So while it may not hurt to have a peanut butter sandwich at lunch time, the studies that showed that it can be helpful for lowering your body weight were aimed at looking into eating it as a snack food between meals.

The reason this can work is that peanut butter tastes great, it feels like you’re eating a rich food when you have it and it’s satisfying.  Therefore, when you snack on a bit of it, you’re more likely to feel satisfied by it and are less likely to overeat.  

In the Purdue University Study that was published in the International Journal of Obesity, the participants who were given peanut butter and peanuts for their snacks were better able to make the right adjustments to the rest of the foods they were eating and, as a result, they ate fewer calories and lost more weight than the control group.  That said, it’s important to point out that while this was designed to be an unbiased study and the methods of the researchers have not been called into question, the funding for the research was funded by the nut industry.

Still, the findings make a lot of sense and they break away from the former belief – which has had a growing amount of evidence to disprove it – that eating high fat foods as snacks should be avoided.  This latest research also supports prior studies (both long- and short-term) that suggest that eating a limited amount of peanuts or peanut butter on a regular basis can decrease the risk of heart disease and can help to lower the risk of gaining weight.