Hey Everyone,
I don’t quite get the label facts for fats. Why does my label (Justin’s Peanut Butter) say, 18g of total fat, but only 3.5 saturated fats? What makes up the other 14.5g of fat?
I know if it’s less than half a gram they can put 0. But that would mean there’s over 28 different types of fat in peanut butter… I just don’t get it.
Thank you
Beau
Hi
I’m UK based so can;t see that particular brand but looking at smooth peanut butter I get the following breakdown of fats in smooth Peant Butter
Total fat 51.8%
Sat Fat 12.8%
Poly Unsaturated Fat 16.9%
Mono Unsaturated fat 19.9%
Now the sum of those three is 49.6% but I can’t find any other fats to add in so there seems to be a small diff… but close enough.
Hey Mark,
Thanks for that, USA here. My label does have % as well. But it just says, in those same columns. Total 23% and Saturated, 18%. So using that I’m still curious what makes up the other 5%. Looking at it that way it sounds like a small difference as opposed to a whopping 14.5 grams of missing fats. Regardless though, I still don’t have the answer 
Peanut itself has little saturated fat, that’s all, nothing mysterious about that 
The percentages you last wrote are for daily recommendations or something, they are totally different from the percentages in grams… The saturated fat is quite little in percentages compared to all the fat.
Hi Shinita,
Right the percentages are daily recommendations…
So back to my original question… 18g of total fat, but only 3.5 saturated fats? What makes up the other 14.5g of fat?
https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/784416/nutrients
Scroll to the bottom of the list of nutrients to find the fat breakdown. This is just generic pb, so your brand varies slightly. Note that in USA the numbers don’t add up sometimes due to rounding up/down. FDA/USDA allow some fiddling there.
There are three types of fat: saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated. So the undescribed 14.5 grams on that label are likely to be a mix of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids.
The U.S. doesn’t care about what kind of fat you eat, as long as you don’t eat artery-clogging-saturated-fat (all one word), which is why saturated is the only type listed separately. There is actually no real scientific data to support the idea that saturated fat causes coronary heart disease, but it got pushed by some influential people fifty years ago, and now we’re stuck with it.