Facepalm

They deserve credit for warning everyone about a situation people might not have realized was dangerous. Damn.

“I eat relatively healthy”

“Sometimes my only food in the entire day is peanut butter”

A few people are in here saying a pound or two a week is an unreasonable amount of peanut butter.

But when you buy peanut butter it comes in a 1-2 pound jar. If it's your main source of protein, your favorite comfort food, or you have a poverty pantry, then I could totally see how you might think that one jar a week isn't too bad.

Two pounds of peanut butter is about 6000 calories, or three days of energy for the average person. It shouldn't be the main staple in your diet, as OPs doctor will attest, but it doesn't seem strictly unreasonable.

I wonder how gourmet or homemade "nothing but peanut" butter compares to something like Kraft that's loaded with sugar. Probably still not super great, but hey, maybe it's better. Or maybe it's worse. Eat a variety if you can.

Oxalic acid is a normal part of the metabolic process. Your body literally creates it during digestion. Avoiding all oxalic acid intake is a nutrition myth and is basically impossible anyway. Fruits contain it, vegetables contain it, grains contain it. You eat it constantly. This person was already severely unhealthy if they gave themselves NAFLD and kidney stones. More likely the crap peanut butter OP was eating was full of preservatives and icing sugar and OP is probably chronically dehydrated.

Oh my god

I did not know that could happen.

Time to find some other foods to replace my #1 go-to 😟

Fuck

As someone who has always had a problem with calcium oxalate stones, I did not know peanut butter is so loaded with oxalates, so this is good information to have.

They cannot be eating relatively healthily if peanut butter is their only food for the whole day lol

The quantity doesn't seem right to me, a normal american peanut butter jar is about 2 pounds. I feel like if the only thing you eat in a day is peanut butter that by itself would be about a half a jar right? Calories would put it at ~1/3 a jar for daily caloric intake but obviously you're going to overshoot if you're eating straight peanut butter. Half a jar in a week just doesn't sound that crazy to me, thats barely over 2 servings/day.

Also peanuts are low in oxalates compared to other nuts. The number I keep finding for a low oxalate diet is 100 mg/day. Apparently 200-300 is a typical amount. The highest number I found is 20mg of oxalate to a tablespoon of PB so 2 pounds a week is only 160mg/day unless I messed up the math.

*I think what happened here is OP is either predisposed to kidney stones and is generalizing the special diet they should be on to everybody else or is just overweight and leaving out that detail since everything I'm reading about NAFLD is that it's caused by obesity not oxalates.

A pound of peanut butter per week sounds insane but apparently it's only like 2 cups and I feel like that's an edible amount. It's a lot but if I really got a hankering for some PB I could do that. But then after a week I would be over it. I feel bad for this person though that apparently they think eating nothing but PB is healthy. A human body needs a variety of different foods and nutrients and evidently eating nothing but peanut butter isn't that.

Seems like you're good if you keep your peanut butter consumption under a fucking pound or two a week!

A pound of peanut butter is around 2600 calories. A pound of Nutella is about 2400 calories. Honestly not as bad as I thought initially.

1 to 2 pounds a week is 370 to 740 calories per day. Eating that much peanut butter for a week or so wouldn’t be too hard, but keeping that rate up consistently would be tough.

Apparently this can really happen.

our patient consumed an estimated five times the typical quantity of oxalate daily. She ingested approximately 150 g of almonds daily ... and six tablespoons (1/8 cup) of chia seeds ... which ultimately caused kidney injury.

150 grams is ~130 almonds, and the chia seeds weigh ~90 grams. I'm surprised it took only 240 grams (about half a pound) of nuts/seeds a day to get sick but that's still way more than most people eat and the relationship between dose and kidney disease isn't linear.

Normally, small amounts of free oxalate are absorbed by the stomach, distal small intestines and colon in humans.

I didn't realize that too much peanut butter could be dangerous, but I also am confident that I am eating significantly less than 5,300 calories per week in peanut butter / peanuts. If you're churning through 2-3 standard jars of peanut butter a week, that's just absurd.

Love that there's a peanut butter subreddit

I remember my grandmother who lived to age 98 told me about an "all-day sucker" - basically fill a spoon in peanut butter, and when it's done, fill it up again. Repeat all day. Can you tell she lived during the depression?

I didn't think much of it as a kid. Thought it was a pretty good idea. Then I learned about food sanitation practices, and reconsidered.

ITT: people underestimating the density of peanut butter

There is nothing unhealthy about peanut butter (when I say that I mean ground peanuts, not the brands with an insane number of additives), but almost anything in extreme quantities can be toxic. Even water.