“Nooooooooo!” I cried with a tear in my eye as I finally realized the truth.
Ever since I read the word “aflatoxin,” I have been on the fence about this for months. There’s no way my beloved peanut butter company would allow that in their jars, is there? What is it anyhow, and why does it matter to me?
As you probably already know, I love eating peanut butter. But I have only bought the kind made with roasted peanuts and salt (mainly Teddie brand) for the past 10 years or more. I love it, my son loves it (he won’t eat any other kind) and the ingredients list is fully minimalist-approved. The other leading brands are full of sugar and palm oil, which you should also know I am vehemently against.
But recently I have had this weird rash show up on my inner elbow on my right arm. It seems to come and go at random… I’ve been trying to figure out what it was or why it was there.
I’ve also had some weeks over the past 2 months that were incredibly stressful for me, so I thought perhaps my skin was just reacting to the stress. But when I talked to my esthetician friend, she looked at me like I was crazy.
“You should never eat peanut butter!” she said. “I’ve literally never seen any peanut butter that didn’t test positive for mold.”
Ahh… so THAT’S what aflatoxins are! They’re a toxic bacteria created by the aspergillus mold, causing mold toxicity in the human body. And over 25% of all peanut butters have been found to contain this toxin.
How can that be? Well, the mold starts growing on the peanuts after they’ve been picked, while they’re being stored, before they get roasted and ground into peanut butter. With millions of peanuts going into the vat in each batch, no one can individually check each one. So a certain percentage of aflatoxin in each batch of peanut butter is deemed “acceptable” by the FDA (much like the number of rat feces and human body parts that are permissible in cereal and other manufactured products. No, I’m not kidding.)
Anyway, as you know from the test in my Gut Healing Protocol, it’s simple enough to test yourself for an allergen. I didn’t even need to use the entire method to figure out that this was the problem with my elbow.
Every time I eat peanut butter, the rash appears. On days I don’t eat peanut butter, it’s gone.
I’m going to grow my own peanuts this year in my garden (yes, I’ve done it before! It just takes a lot of peanuts to make peanut butter) and I’ll experiment with fermenting them and making my own butter. But until then, I’m looking at the last half jar of Teddie in my cupboard with a sigh and a tear as I say goodbye to a favorite food.
Here are a few other resources you can read to get more information about aflatoxin mold in peanut butter:
- https://eatpraygetwell.com/do-valencia-peanuts-have-less-mold-for-the-peanut-lovers/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6409992/
- https://at-my-table.com/the-solution-to-mold-in-nuts/
- https://eatbeautiful.net/aflatoxins-in-peanut-butter-how-much-do-the-leading-brands-have/
I hope you don’t have the same reaction I do, but I promised to make you guys aware of any new information I came across that might help you and this is definitely important!
If you haven’t started your journey of healing your gut, please get started today! The prices of ALL my courses are going up on April 1st, so now is the best time to get started.