Packed with 190 calories and 16 grams of fat per serving, peanut butter hardly sounds like the stuff...

1. Can You Slim Down on Peanut Butter Diet?
Packed with 190 calories and 16 grams of fat per serving, peanut butter hardly sounds like the stuff
that diets are made of. But two recent studies suggest people can actually lose weight by centering
their meals around this popular spread.
The reason? It tastes good.
"Overweight people thought peanut butter was taboo," says , says Holly McCord, nutrition editor of
Prevention magazine. "But studies now say that beachbody you don't just lose weight on the diet, but
you stick with the diet better, because peanut butter is tastier and more satisfying, compared to
other low-fat, high-carb diets."
McCord's new book, The Peanut Butter Diet, was prompted by two recent studies, one from Harvard
University, the other from Penn State. Researchers found that a diet that includes foods with high
levels of monounsaturated fats like peanut butter can help people lose weight and prevent heart
disease.
Like other weight-loss programs, a peanut butter diet should be done in conjunction with exercise.
And dieters are warned to avoid over-indulging -- eat too much and you can gain weight.
Taste Comes First
When Prevention magazine ran an article on the peanut butter diet in March, it was the best-selling
issue of the year, so the magazine decided to create a book of peanut butter recipes. They range
from diet program peanut butter oatmeal, to entrees such as Tahitian chicken with peanut butter
mango sauce and curried peanut butter soup.
"The studies have concluded that taste comes first, so you have to like what you're eating, "McCord
says. In studies, people in the low-fat group were jealous of those assigned to the peanut butter diet.
The Harvard study, done jointly with Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, looked at 101 people
who weighed about 200 pounds each, and divided them into two groups. One group was put on a
traditional low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet; the other got richer fare -- the so-called peanut butter
diet -- that allowed them to to get 35 percent of their calories from fat, 50 percent from
carbohydrates and 15 percent from protein.
But the fat in this diet was the good kind: "heart-healthy" monounsaturated fats, found in foods such
as olives, nuts, avocados and peanut butter. Such fats can lower bad cholesterol and so reduce the
risk of heart disease.
Researchers found that the first thing that people in the moderate fat group wanted to choose was
peanut butter. Over the first six months (the "honeymoon" period in most diets), both groups lost an
average of 11 pounds, McCord said.
But after 18 months, three times as many people on the higher unsaturated-fat diet had stuck with
the program and kept the weight off. People in the low-fat diet regained an average of five pounds

2. each.
Ping-Pong Portions
Even though such research suggest the potential virtues of eating peanut butter, dieters cannot go
hog wild and eat peanut butter straight out of the jar, McCord warns. As with other diets, it is
important to limit portions.
In the Prevention plan, women get two servings twice a day of peanut butter (four servings total) --
think of it as the equivalent of two ping-pong ball size servings. Because men tend to be larger, so
are their portions: They are allotted six tablespoons of peanut butter a day (the equivalent of three
ping-pong balls a day).
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=126647