Peanut butter sandwich a humble hero

Peanut butter sandwich a humble hero
Donna Jacobs, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Monday, May 26, 2008

Behold the peanut butter sandwich.

On whole-grain bread, this portable fast-food marvel is a complete source of all 20 protein-building amino acids found in meat, fish, eggs and cheese.

The "PBS" is the modern take on the ancient cultural discovery that has saved mankind over millennia: Mix a grain (wheat, corn, rice, oats and barley) with a legume (beans, peas, peanuts, soybeans) and you get a complete set of amino acids.

Peanuts, beloved of mouse, elephant, bird, dog, man -- and kangaroo.

Last week, German zoo staff used peanut butter as a lure. The six-year-old kangaroo, Toto, took a four-metre fence-clearing leap to two weeks of freedom. Peanut butter -- his favourite food -- played a big part in his capture.

The peanut's historic profile has been uneven: forgotten and re-hailed.

These days, it has regained its hero status from the early 1900s when U.S. botanist Dr. George Washington Carver and health-food pioneer Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of dry breakfast cereal, raised it to prominence.

Today, the peanut appears in its newest reincarnation as the nutritional powerhouse Plumpy'nut.

As Milton Tectonidis, a Paris-based nutrition specialist for Médecins Sans Frontières, told the International Herald Tribune during Niger's 2005 food crisis, Plumpy'nut can restore a starving baby whose skin sags over tiny bones to normal roundness in two to four weeks.

"This product, it's beyond opinion," said Mr. Tectonidis. "It's documented; it's scientific fact. We've seen it working. With this one product, we can treat three-quarters of children on an outpatient basis."

In his optimistic report, journalist Michael Wines wrote: "Plumpy'nut, which comes in a silvery foil package the size of two grasping baby-sized hands, is 500 calories of fortified peanut butter, stuffed with milk, vitamins and minerals.

"Since the packets came into the hands of relief organizations during the Darfur crisis in Sudan, they have been revolutionizing emergency care for severely malnourished children who are old enough to take solid food, by taking care out of crowded field hospitals and straight into mothers' homes.

"The prescription given to mothers here is simple: give one baby two packets of Plumpy'nut each day. Watch him wolf them down. Wait for him to grow. Which he will, almost immediately: badly malnourished babies can gain one to two pounds a week eating Plumpy'nut."

Ready to eat, it eliminates the need for local water, so often dirty and harbouring disease organisms. It is cheap -- 14 foil packets a week (a four-week supply costs $20). It has a two-year shelf life. It can be given at home, replacing the traditional hospital treatment of vitamin-laced milk.

Children are sent home with Plumpy'nut along with a vitamin-packed grain-based flour, such as Unimix, for a traditional African porridge. André Briend, a French scientist, had worked for years, frustrated, searching for a ready-to eat nutrient-rich food. One day, he glanced at the jar of Nutella -- the hazelnut chocolate spread -- on his kitchen table and he came up with a peanut butter-based paste. The French company, Nutriset, began producing his formula under the Plumpy'nut brand. The paste is now being made in the Congo, Ethiopia, Malawi and Niger, where it is mixed with Nutriset's blend of vitamins and minerals.

ast year, the UN's World Health Organization and UNICEF declared Project Peanut Butter, a therapeutic feeding program for starving children in Malawi and Sierra Leone, as "the most effective method for treating severely malnourished children the world over."

They based this rave review on the work of Dr. Mark Manary, a world expert on severe childhood malnutrition and a professor of pediatric medicine at the St. Louis' (Missouri) Washington University School of Medicine, who started the non-profit Project Peanut Butter.

He conducted a three-year clinical trial in Malawi with Plumpy'nut, which is now classed as an RUTF -- Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food. In Malawi, an estimated 70 per cent of children are malnourished; an estimated 13 per cent of them die from it before age five.

In sub-Saharan Africa, 4.8 million children die of before they're five; malnutrition contributes to half of these deaths.

Worldwide, malnutrition kills 10 children every minute.

Dr. Manary found that Plumpy'nut cured 89 per cent of severely malnourished children. This compared wonderfully to traditional recovery rates of 25 to 40 per cent for hospitalizing and treating children with vitamin-enriched milk -- and then sending them home with nutritional powder that is often mixed with dirty water, further sickening the babies.

"What's really exciting to me is that we've demonstrated that we can put this research into practice on a large scale," Dr. Manary said recently. "It can benefit tens of thousands of kids, and there are not going to be operational barriers in some very remote settings like sub-Saharan Africa."

While current research is directed at saving children, can an adult version be far away for drought, famine, natural disasters and human-driven catastrophes? Peanuts have saved the lives of African children before.

George Washington Carver -- probably the peanut's all-time greatest promoter -- occasionally resorted to showmanship. In his most famous meal, he served a dinner whose every dish had peanuts as an ingredient.

But he directed most of his work on peanuts to restoring the hard-hit South after the U.S. Civil War, to teaching people to feed themselves, to restoring the cotton-depleted soil and to providing a saleable crop to newly freed slaves and white farmers alike. Sometimes, his work went well beyond the South.

Upon his death, in 1943, a missionary in the Congo wrote to Dr. Carver's long-time assistant, Austin Curtis: "We have been so indebted to him for 25 years, when I first learned of his work in extracting milk from the peanut. You see, it has never been possible for us to keep farm animals in interior Africa, for they are attacked by tigers and sickened by tsetse flies. So it used to be that when a new mother could give no milk her baby soon died.

"When I wrote this information to Dr. Carver in 1918, he responded by instructing us on the culture of the peanut plant and with detailed information on the procedure for deriving milk from the nuts. Hundreds of infants were so saved from death, and for this we can never properly express our thanks."

While peanuts are indigenous to Africa (they're called ground nuts) and allergies are all but unheard of, peanuts are a leading source of food allergies in the industrialized countries where they are off-limits to many school children.

Scientists are working on non-allergenic strains to restore the PBS one day to its rightful place in today's school lunchbag. Researchers are also working on immunotherapy to eliminate people's vulnerability to food allergens.

The famous 16-year (1976-1990) Harvard's Nurses' Health Study (tracking 83,800 female nurses) showed that eating one tablespoon of peanut butter or one ounce of peanuts or other nuts at least five times a week reduces the risk of adult-onset diabetes by more than 20 per cent. Other large-population health studies show that eating small but frequent servings of peanut butter, nuts and peanuts can decrease the risk of heart disease by 25 to 50 per cent.

Donna Jacobs is an Ottawa writer; her e-mail address is [email protected]

© The Ottawa Citizen 2008