How to 100% peanut butter have more protein than 100% peanuts

caloriesnutrient-compositionpeanut-butterpeanuts

I am looking at:

  • 100% peanut butter (no added salt, sugar, oils or anything else)
  • 100% roasted peanuts (no added salt, sugar, oils or anything else)

When looking thought different sources, I can always notice the following:

  • Peanut butter has more protein (as % of calories) than peanuts

example sources (I've looked through a dozen more, but please check others, maybe mine are not representative?):

http://www.waitrose.com/shop/ProductView-10317-10001-5588-Waitrose+LOVE+life+roasted+peanuts

http://shop.wholeearthfoods.com/collections/award-winning-peanut-butter/products/whole-earth-100-nuts-crunchy-peanut-butte-227-g

Why is this? If no ingredients are added, how is it possible for the macronutrients to change (as % of the calories). Different levels of roasting cannot be the reason because they should not change macronutrients disproportionally.

The only explanation I can think of is if in the process of making peanut butter, some part of the peanut is removed and that part contains a low protein amount. Some sources say that when peanut butter is made, the 'bitter heart of the peanut' is removed. Could that explain it?

If anyone has some insight I would be very interested to learn.

Best Answer

There's definitely some rounding going on because the peanut butter has 100.1g of nutrients per 100g of product. This isn't enough to explain the discrepancy. Adding up the nutrients on the roasted peanuts gives 95.4g. I think we can assume the other 4.6% is water. So perhaps more water has been driven off the peanut butter.

What I think is more likely (though could be additional) is that there's significantly less fat in the peanut butter (48.1% vs 51.7%). While this could be down to different varieties of peanut, I suspect some fat is removed in the processing, perhaps to avoid an oil slick on the surface.

Most likely of all is just different source data. Different peanuts may have been used in the calculations -- whether that is consistent with the actual ingredients used is another matter. In fact if you look at nutrition information for raw peanuts online, you'll get a range of values. There's nothing special about peanuts, the same is true for bananas. I'm sure if you look at the scientific literature on any foodstuff, you'll find a range of values published, reflecting natural variation as well as measurement variabilility -- this will then propagate to the values published to the consumer.