Remember this timeless dynamic duo? Healthier than s’mores, and don’t require building a fire. If you grind your own peanut butter fresh at the supermarket, you know you’re avoiding all the sugars and added trans fats that go along with conventional store-bought peanut butter. What you may not know, however, is that peanut butter, both organic and nonorganic, contains aflatoxin. Uh oh! Aflatoxin is a mold found (by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences) to be directly linked to liver cancer. While the aflatoxin in food may not exceed minute amounts, according to the FDA, exposure to hot or humid environments can cause these small amounts of mold to grow. A particularly risky place is the grinding machines that customers use in the grocery store, which are not tested by the FDA for levels of the mold.
To minimize the amount of aflatoxin in your peanut butter, you can do the following:
* If you grind the peanuts yourself, refrigerate the resulting peanut butter as soon as possible. Or,
* Buy store-bought organic peanut butter which has already been put into sealed containers.
credit: kafka4 on flickr
Johns Hopkins University researchers found that eating celery, parsnips, carrots, parsley and other leafy greens with peanut butter actually reduces the amounts of aflatoxin in your body, so feel confident and healthy the next time you crunch away on your organic peanut butter and celery, with raisins on top. This artistic concoction is also called “ants on a log.”
Submitted by Mina Arasteh
