Peanut butter is a well-known stable in most homes, but is it a good choice for you if you do bodybuilding?
Does peanut butter have any health benefits, or you'd better avoid it?
How does peanut butter affect bodybuilding? Is it good or bad?
Peanut butter is good for bodybuilding because it has a lot of calories and digests slowly, which helps us feel full when we're cutting calories.
As long as we don't eat too much of it, peanut butter is good for building muscle.
To add peanut butter to our diet without letting it get in the way of our bodybuilding goals, we need to know how it could help us and how it could hurt us.
- Peanut Butter Calories
The number of calories in peanut butter depends on what kind we buy, but on average, one serving has between 180 and 200 calories.
Most peanut butter brands use 2 tablespoons as a serving size, but some don't.
It's important to read the nutrition label to find out what size serving the nutrition information is based on.
All-natural peanut butter that only has peanuts in it tends to have more calories.
Most of the time, the ones that aren't natural and have added sugars have fewer calories.
Some people may find this strange, but we'll talk about why this is the case.
This is a perfect example of how products that are thought to be "healthier" have more calories than products that are thought to be "not as healthy."
Even though calories do affect how much we weigh, it's important to know that just because a food has fewer calories doesn't mean it's healthier.
What Peanut Butter Is Made Of Peanut butter is mostly a fat source because it has more fat than protein or carbohydrates.
How much fat is in peanut butter depends on whether it is natural peanut butter or peanut butter that has been sweetened? There will be more grams of fat in natural peanut butter than in peanut butter that has been sweetened. A serving of natural peanut butter, which is 2 tablespoons, has about 16 grams of fat, while a serving of sweetened peanut butter usually has fewer grams of fat.
Still, the fat content of sweetened peanut butter is sometimes the same as that of natural peanut butter.
This is because manufacturers sometimes add vegetable oil and/or trans fats to the product along with the sugar, which lowers the nutritional value of the product.
Because sugars are added to sweetened peanut butter, it has more carbs than natural peanut butter.
So instead of having mostly fats in a serving, the sweetened version will have almost the same amount of fats and carbs.
This is because fat has 9 calories per gram and carbs only have 4 calories per gram.
This is why natural peanut butter can sometimes have more calories than sweetened peanut butter.
So, the natural peanut butter has more calories per serving, especially if the sweetened kind doesn't have any added vegetable oil.
Peanut butter is often thought of as a source of protein, but it only has 8 grams of protein per serving, which is not as much as we might think.
- Micronutrient Content of Peanut Butter
Peanut butter has a moderate number of micronutrients like vitamin E, niacin, manganese, vitamin B6, and magnesium.
These small amounts of nutrients are important, but we should eat peanut butter with fruit or vegetable to get the most out of them.
If you don't like celery and peanut butter or carrots and peanut butter, we'll probably pair it with fruit.
Because the micronutrients in peanut butter come from peanuts, and the sweetened kind has fewer peanuts per serving than the natural kind, the natural kinds will have more micronutrients than the sweetened ones.
Three reasons why eating peanut butter is good for bodybuilding.
When it comes to building muscle, peanut butter has these pros:
- Peanut Butter Keeps Us Full
Peanut butter in our bodybuilding meals and snacks will help us feel full longer, which is especially helpful when we're trying to lose weight.
When we're on a diet, we eat fewer calories than our bodies burn in a day, so we often feel hungry throughout the day.
Eating foods that digest slowly and keep us full for longer can help a lot.
Peanut butter can keep us full long enough to get us to our next meal without too much pain, which is especially helpful as the amount of food we eat every day goes down.
- It's easy to eat peanut butter.
Peanut butter is very easy to eat, and it can be added to a meal or snack to make it higher in calories, which can help when we're trying to gain weight.
Peanut butter is easy to eat, which can be helpful when we're trying to gain weight and need to eat more calories than usual.
When we don't feel like eating, it's helpful to have foods that are easy to eat in large quantities.
Finding foods that are easy to eat can make getting or staying at a healthy weight a lot more fun.
- Peanut Butter Is Versatile
Peanut butter goes with a lot of different meals and snacks, which makes it a staple for bodybuilders who often care more about hitting their macros than making a meal that goes together well.
Bodybuilders can benefit from products that can be used in a lot of different ways, like peanut butter.
Sometimes, in order to hit our macros, we have to eat weird combinations of foods.
So having foods that go well with almost everything makes the whole process more fun.
Three Cons of Eating Peanut Butter to Build Muscle When it comes to bodybuilding, the bad things about peanut butter are:
- There are a lot of calories in peanut butter.
Since peanut butter has more calories, it has a greater chance of changing our body weight and shape.
For people who are trying to gain weight, it could be helpful, but for people who are trying to lose weight, the calories could add up quickly.
We should be aware of how many calories peanut butter has and how much we eat because, even though it makes us feel full for longer, it could be a problem if we eat so much of it that it takes away from other macronutrients, mostly protein.
When bodybuilding is our main goal, we should always keep our overall calorie goal in mind.
This way, we can tell if we're eating too much or not enough based on our goals.
- Most of the time, peanut butter servings are overestimated.
A serving of peanut butter is hard to estimate, and most people tend to overestimate it.
This makes it easy to eat too much of it.
Probably the best way to avoid this is to measure out a serving size.
If we can afford to eat a few more calories than we had planned, this might not be a problem.
But if we're on a diet and need to be more careful about the calories and macronutrients we eat, peanut butter can be a problem if we don't keep track of how much we eat.
- Peanut Butter Is Often a Binge Trigger For Dieting Athletes
When bodybuilding athletes are trying to get as lean as possible, they put a lot of limits on what they can eat.
Peanut butter is often one of the foods they find hard to eat in moderation because they want it so much and most bodybuilders keep it on hand.
Peanut butter is tasty, and most bodybuilding athletes eat it every day, but it can be a problem when athletes can't control themselves around it.
Fair enough, it's not the peanut butter's fault, but keeping peanut butter in the house can be too tempting for some bodybuilders.
It's also important to note that it's not always the athletes' fault.
They don't set out to eat a lot of peanut butter, but when our bodies reach a certain level of hunger, it can cause us to have strong cravings.
- Can Peanut Butter be eaten before a workout?
Peanut butter has a lot of fat, which takes longer to digest, so you shouldn't eat it about an hour and a half before you work out.
But if we eat it 2 to 3 hours before a workout, it can be a good pre-workout meal when combined with protein and carbs.
We can eat peanut butter or any other fat before a workout as long as we give it enough time to digest before the workout starts.
If the fat hasn't been broken down by the time we work out, we're likely to have stomach problems, which makes working out much less fun.
To avoid this, we shouldn't eat peanut butter right before a workout.
Instead, we should eat it 2 to 3 hours before we work out.
- Can Peanut Butter be eaten after a workout?
We can eat peanut butter after working out because it won't hurt us.
But we should know that after a workout, it's more important to eat more carbs and protein than fats.
We need more protein and carbs after a workout to get our energy back up and help our muscles repair and grow. Check out our other article on eggs for bodybuilding.
It talks about how you can add more protein to your diet after you work out.
If eating fats after a workout makes us eat less protein and carbs, we should avoid doing it.
But there is no problem if fats like peanut butter are eaten with enough carbs and protein.
- Does peanut butter help you get bigger muscles?
Peanut butter can help us gain muscle because it makes us eat more calories.
When our bodies have more calories than they need, they are better able to use them to build muscle.
However, we also need to eat enough protein.
Peanut butter can't make your muscles grow on its own, but it can help.
To make muscles grow, we would need to eat enough protein throughout the day and give our muscles the right kind of training stimulus.
- Is peanut butter okay to eat when bulking?
We can eat peanut butter while trying to gain weight because it has a lot of calories and will help us reach our daily calorie goal.
But it can also make us feel full longer, so if we eat too much of it, we might not be able to eat again.
Peanut butter has a lot of fat, which gives us extra calories we need to gain weight.
However, fat is hard to digest, so it could keep us full for too long.
When we aren't hungry, it can be harder to keep eating the calories we need to reach our calorie goal.
If it's hard to get enough calories while bulking up without getting too full, we may want to focus more on carbs than fats because carbs are broken down faster.