Fat Math

“I couldn’t find the ‘Reduced Fat Jif Chunky Peanut Butter’ that you like anywhere,” said my husband, placing bags on the counter as he returned home from a grocery shopping trip, “Both stores seem to have stopped carrying it. I bought you ‘Reduced Fat Creamy Jif’ instead.”

“That’s OK.” I replied. I had taken to snacking on that particular spread, prefering it to regular peanut butter because... well, because ’reduced fat’ had a healthy sound to it. I had never actually bothered to make a head-to-head comparison of the nutritional information (full fat vs. reduced fat). But now, because I knew we had a jar of the ‘full fat’ stuff in the cupboard, I decided to do just that.

“It doesn’t add up!” I exclaimed to myself, “Both jars proclaim that the serving size is ‘2 Tbsp,’ AND both list that the serving provides 190 Calories...” I scratched my head in puzzlement. “How can one be lower in fat...” I quickly rummaged through my brain for the file labled ‘food chemistry,’ “When fat contains 9 Calories per gram, while both carbohydrate and protien contain 4 Calories per gram?”

I doodled around with pencil, paper and calculator for about 20 minutes, during which time I uncovered other inconsistancies, such as (assuming the peanut butter actually contains the grams of fat, protein and carb proclaimed on the label) the number of calories per serving would be closer to 200 than 190 in each case.

Anyway, I finally noticed that 2 Tbsp of the reg. p-nut butter was listed as being 32 grams, and 2 Tbsp of the lo fat was proclaimed as being 36 grams. It’s denser. That would explain it, more or less...