Which peanut butters are just peanuts?

The ones with the shortest ingredient list: peanuts, and salt if you want it. On this page 113 of 271 jars are exactly that. Everything else adds sugar, a hardened oil to stop separation, or a sweetener. That does not make the others bad, and two grams of sugar in a sandwich is not the thing to worry about, but if you are choosing between two jars it is the difference you are actually choosing between.

To stop it separating. Peanut butter is ground peanuts, and ground peanuts release their oil and float it to the top of the jar. A small amount of palm or fully hydrogenated vegetable oil holds the mixture together so it is spreadable straight from the cupboard. The alternative is stirring it, and keeping the jar upside down in the fridge once you have.

A typical jar with added sugar has around 8 to 10 grams per 100g, which is about 2 grams in a sandwich, roughly half a teaspoon. That is not much on its own. It is worth knowing about because peanut butter is a food people eat every day and often assume has none, and because the jars without it taste more strongly of peanut, which some people prefer and some do not.

Sugar and protein are grams per 100 grams as printed on the label, which is the fair way to compare because serving sizes differ between brands. One quirk worth knowing before you read the ranking too closely: US labels give sugar in whole grams on a 32g serving, so converted to 100g the figures land on multiples of about 3.1. That is why 76 jars here read exactly 6.2g and another 47 read 9.4g. Jars showing the same number are reporting the same rounded label figure rather than an identical recipe, so treat small gaps in this column as noise. The badges come from the ingredient list on the same label: added sugar covers sugar, cane syrup, molasses, honey, corn syrup and dextrose; added oil covers palm, cottonseed, rapeseed, soybean and anything hydrogenated, but not peanut oil, which is peanut.

Open Food Facts, a free and open database of food labels, the same source behind our cereal sugar and protein bar pages. It is crowdsourced, so a label can be out of date or mistyped, and manufacturers change recipes. Check the jar before you rely on it for an allergy or a diet.