Is your child’s school nut-free? Are you scrambling for an alternative to peanut butter? If so, you aren’t the only one. As kids return to our educational institutions, parents and children alike often need to find a way to eat safely, whether they are allergic themselves or are supporting classmates who are.
Well, here’s the news: peanut butter is out and sunflower seed butter is in.
Sunflower seed butter has been around for a number of years. It’s relatively easy to find in most health food stores. While a bit stronger tasting than the traditional nut butters (like peanut and almond), it still makes a tasty sandwich. Sunflower seed butter packs dietary fiber, protein, Vitamin E, B Vitamins, and minerals such as potassium, magnesium, iron, phosphorus, selenium, calcium and zinc into every bite. Try it with apple butter - the natural sweetness of the apple is a great compliment to the seed butter.
You can also consider pumpkin seed butter. Pumpkin seeds provide a a good source of protein as well as the essential minerals iron, zinc, manganese, magnesium, phosphorus, copper and potassium. You also get some omega fatty acids in each bite. We buy this seed butter and eat it with honey. Pumpkin seed butter is a new taste for most kids, so expect to disguise it (unless your kids are like mine and really get a kick out of trying new foods.)
Given that seed butters are often less sweet as well as stronger tasting, we sometimes eat them with a bit of xylitol sprinkled on top. Xylitol has all the sweet of sugar with some unique properties:
1. Xylitol has less impact on blood sugar, so you won’t have kids bouncing off the walls after eating it.
2. It’s lower calorie. Xylitol has 9.6 calories per teaspoon as compared to 15 calories per teaspoon for ordinary sugar.
3. Xylitol is considered a tooth-friendly sugar, because it helps to kill bacteria in the mouth. Clinical studies also show that it reduces plaque.
Unlike many other natural sweeteners, you can use xylitol just like regular table sugar. While slightly less sweet, in our house we substitute spoon for spoon. Keep in mind that xylitol is usually made from corn, so those with corn allergies should research the source of their xylitol before buying.
For those who don’t have to avoid soy, there’s soy nut butter. It doesn’t have as strong a taste as other seed butters, so may be better tolerated by a picky eater. In fact, soy is a legume, just like a peanut; as a result, soy butter tastes remarkably like peanut butter. This could make soy nut butter the best choice for a kid who is really hooked on peanut butter, but has to give it up because of a peanut-free school allergy policy. Soy will also pack a lot of protein per serving, while dishing up less fat than traditional peanut butter. Be sure to buy organic if you want to avoid genetically modified food, as almost 90 per cent of non-organic soy will be GMO.
If you are looking for something totally different, consider hemp seed butter, a nutty tasting seed butter made from hemp seeds. Hemp is the new craze in healthy eating circles, where it is claimed to be one of the most nutritionally complete foods on earth. The amino acid composition of hemp is closer to “complete” sources of proteins (like meat, milk and eggs) than most other seed oils. Only soy butter has more amino acids per serving.
It certainly seemed simpler back in the days when the only option was the lowly peanut. Are you left feeling a bit sentimental for your PB&J? Take heart. Someday your kids could come home and ask for a SSB&J. That’s sunflower seed butter and jam, for the uninitiated.
