The peanut butter is made from the same elements as your standard store-bought PB – roasted peanuts, sugar, hydrogenated fat and salt – and was even “prepared by a commercial manufacturer of peanut butter whose name you would recognize,'' NIST chemist Katherine E. Sharpless told The New York Times in 2003, but its elements have been meticulously analyzed by scientists to determine the precise amount of everything it contains, from dietary fiber and fatty acids to acrylamide, aflatoxins and amino acids. This kind of data is apparently essential to food industry and testing labs, which use reference foods as a baseline in their analysis of other foods.