15 Fun Facts About Peanut Butter

By
Robin Shreeves
Robin Shreeves
Writer
  • Cairn University
  • Rowan University
  • Wine School of Philadelphia
Robin Shreeves is a freelance writer who focuses on sustainability, wine, travel, food, parenting, and spirituality.
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Updated June 5, 2017
If you're a man, you're more likely to prefer crunchy peanut butter to the creamy version. (Photo: ChameleonsEye/Shutterstock).

I am a peanut butter lover. I ate peanut butter and jelly every day for school lunch from first grade until I graduated from high school. I still enjoy the occasional pb&j; sandwich at lunch time, and peanut butter on multi-grain toast is one of my go-to quick breakfasts.

November is National Peanut Butter Lovers Month, one of six peanut butter-related holidays mentioned on the National Peanut Board’s website. In honor of this industry-created holiday, some fun facts about peanut butter are in order, along with some recipes that use this beloved nut butter.

  1. Archibutyrophobia (pronounced A’-ra-kid-bu-ti-ro-pho-bi-a) is the fear of getting peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth.
  2. Women and children like creamy peanut butter best.
  3. Men like chunky peanut butter best.
  4. The world’s largest peanut butter and jelly sandwich, made in Grand Saline, T.X., weighed 1,342 pounds.
  5. It takes one acre of peanuts to make 30,000 peanut butter sandwiches.
  6. We spend almost $800 million a year on peanut butter in the United States.
  7. The average child will eat 1,500 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before graduating from high school. (I suppose I’m above average. Based on a 180-day school year, I ate about 2,160, just in school. That doesn’t count weekend and summers.)
  8. If you took all the peanut butter that Americans eat in a year, it could coat the floor of the Grand Canyon.
  9. If you add the amount of straight peanut butter plus peanut butter products consumed in America each year, they'd weigh 1.5 billion pounds.
  10. Peanuts aren’t nuts. They’re legumes. So it’s technically inaccurate to call it a nut butter, but it's usually refered to one anyway.
  11. Most peanut butters are vegan and gluten-free.
  12. It might be cancer-fighting. Girls between the age of 9 and 15 who regularly ate peanut butter were 39 percent less likely to develop benign breast disease by 30.
  13. The south has the best climate for growing peanuts in the United States. Sixty percent them are grown in Georgia, Florida, and Alabama and Half of that 60 percent is used to make peanut butter.
  14. There’s a jar of peanut butter in 75 percent of the homes in America.
  15. Not everyone is crazy about peanut butter, especially those who are allergic to peanuts. About 1.3 percent of the American population is allergic to peanuts. (That’s a not-so-fun fact.)