Will eating peanut butter and nuts in general make someone fat.
They are high in protein and can be used to meet daily requirements, however would a person get fat from this, nuts have healthy complex fats, but looking at nutrition facts on Google says you can get 70% of your daily fat from this, add nuts to the equation and you would be over your fat limit for someone who eats 2000 calories.
I was under the impression that you needed a calorie surplus to gain fat, so can anyone here clear the confusion, if a person eats (healthy) fatty foods but maintains a good lifestyle and thus doesn’t eat over recommended calories will they gain fat?
It’s only about calories. If you eat more calories than you need (maintenance calories), you will gain weight
It’s just easier to go over your calorie limit eating fats because fats have 9 calories per gram. Whereas protein and carbs have 4 calories per gram.
Even if someone was on a high protein diet, and they ate so much protein that their total calories are more than their maintenance calories, they would still gain weight.
surplus. it is easier to be in a surplus since fats have 9 calories per gram compared to the other two macronutrients, carbohydrates and protein, which only have 4. that is why low fat diets became all the rage in the 80s. and then the atkins diet came along, along with the elimination of carbs to force the body into ketosis, and run on your own body fat and nutritional fat as fuel.
If you are gaining fat mass, you are eating at a calorie surplus. However, eating more will not necessarily cause you to gain weight.
Confused?
It’s because our bodies are driven by hormones and biochemistry - there is no “calorie counter” function. There is a built-in weight control system; to oversimplify, fat cells secrete leptin so the more fat you have, the more leptin in your system. The leptin levels are sensed by the brain and that is one of the things that controls hunger - the more leptin, the less hunger.
The real question for weight is not how much fat you are eating (and how much excess carbohydrate is being converted to fat) but how much fat you are burning. You can be adding a small amount of fat to your system but if you are burning less than that per day, you will gain fat mass. Conversely, you might be eating a lot of fat, but if you are burning more than that per day, you will lose fat mass.
So it really comes down to fat metabolism, and that comes down to insulin resistance. If you stay insulin sensitive, you likely won’t need to worry about fat gain. If you become insulin resistant, you will probably gain fat mass (most, but not all people do), and you will become metabolically unhealthy.
And it’s fructose intake that drives insulin resistance.
It requires a surplus. It is really easy to overeat nuts and peanut butter if you aren’t careful though. If you weight those foods out on a food scale you will notice the servings have a very low amount of food volume for the calories.
It’s usually assumed that fat gain means weight gain. While this is generally true it is possible to loose lean tissue while gaining fat, with the overall weight looking pretty similar and no calorie surplus. If your fat is more insulin sensitive than your lean tissue, you can loose lean tissue and gain fat. What makes fat insulin sensitive? One idea is too much linoleic acid in the diet. Peanuts and nuts in general have loads of linoleic acid, and while they have significant protein, beans have a better amino acid score and much less fat, and the complex fats they have are in better balance with much more equal ratio of omega 3 to omega 6.