Peanut butter and oatmeal are versatile foods that work well with other options. Find out if the combination is possible and whether it is any good.
The quick answer is yes, you can put peanut butter in oatmeal. This ingredient can help you consume more protein and still contains nice amounts of fiber, vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients.
One thing to note is that some brands add sugars and oils to their peanut butters. These are generally less healthy and less helpful for goals like weight loss.
Can you do it?
Peanut butter is definitely one of the oatmeal ingredients you can consider. You can add it at basically any point in the oatmeal preparation process and eat the combination for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
Whether you want to add the peanut butter to the oatmeal before microwaving/cooking or after is mostly a case of personal preference.
Adding the peanut butter before cooking the oatmeal will result in a more liquid mix.
If you like the creamy texture of peanut butter, you may want to add it to the oatmeal at the end as a finisher.
In both cases, peanut butter can provide you with nice amounts of protein, fiber, vitamins, minerals, and other micronutrients.
Things to keep in mind
Before making peanut butter the central ingredient of your oatmeal you do want to keep two things in mind.
The first one is that some brands add a lot of sugar and oils. This makes the peanut butter less healthy and higher in calories.
While you can still eat these, you generally want to go for the clean peanut butters if eating healthy is a priority.
Next, even the peanut butters without added sugar and oils are relatively high in calories. 100 grams of peanuts contains around 567 calories (1).
Peanut butter is generally not as helpful for weight loss compared to something like chia seeds in your oatmeal. You may need to limit the amount you use.
5 Benefits of peanut butter in oatmeal
By now, it is clear that peanut butter and oatmeal can be a good combination. The question then becomes why you would choose peanut butter over other ingredients.
1. You may like the taste
The first reason is relatively straightforward. You may simply like the taste and texture peanut butter brings to your oatmeal.
Enjoying your food is not just a luxury that is nice to have. It can also help you stay consistent with your diet plan. In turn, this can lead to other health benefits (if you have a good diet plan).
2. Can help you hit your protein goals
Next, peanuts are relatively high in protein. More precisely, 100 grams contain around 25.8 grams of protein (1).
Oatmeal contains a decent amount of protein, 16.9 grams per 100 grams of raw oats (2). However, it is clear that peanut butter can add a nice amount to this.
Most people know protein for its potential to benefit muscle growth and muscle preservation. However, protein is also essential for a variety of processes that result in good health.
3. Reduces the blood sugar spike
There are foods that are worse but oatmeal can still raise your blood sugar a good amount.
Healthy individuals should likely not worry too much about oatmeal in this area. However, you may want to reduce this to some extent.
Having high blood sugar for extended periods of time seems to be bad for human health (3, 4). Eating foods that raise your blood sugar a lot is one of the causes of this.
Because peanut butter raises your blood sugar a lot less, 100 grams of oatmeal and peanut butter should raise your blood sugar less than oatmeal alone.
Additionally, eating protein with a food like oatmeal seems to reduce the blood sugar rise from this food (5).
4. Barely requires any work
Eating healthy can sometimes require some extra time and effort. Even so, there are also ingredients like peanut butter that barely require any work.
You simply take a spoon and scoop some on your oatmeal at the point of the preparation process where you like it the most. No extra work is required. It is as simple as that.
5. Changes up the nutrients
Whole foods contain a lot of different macro and micronutrients. Most people want to which of these are the most important for health but this is generally not that easy to say.
A strategy to compensate for the lack of human knowledge in this field is varying the foods you eat. This helps you get at least some amounts of a variety of nutrients that could turn out to be important for health.
By adding peanut butter to your oatmeal, you consume more of different nutrients, known and unknown ones. This is often a good idea in absence of well-informed personal recommendations.
