Go nuts! Why the calorie counts for almonds (and other nuts) don’t add up

Photo by Remi Yuan on Unsplash

This is an excerpt from ZOE’s blog. Read the full post here.

A quick Google search will tell you that nuts usually contain between 5 and 7 calories per gram. That’s a high number, especially when you consider that a grilled cheese sandwich clocks in at around 5 calories per gram, and a typical pizza has less than 3.

Even a small one-ounce portion of nuts (28 grams) can contain around 15 grams of fat and 170 calories.

These figures have led nuts to be labelled as a potential diet-buster that should be consumed with caution. But reality doesn’t match up to this bad reputation.

The truth is that eating lots of nuts does not make you fatter. Numerous scientific studies have shown that eating nuts will not make you gain weight, despite their high fat content.

In fact, people who eat two or more portions of nuts a week are much less likely to gain weight, compared with people who rarely eat them.

So what’s going on?

Photo by Mgg Vitchakorn on Unsplash

Warning: this research contains nuts

In a study by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 2012, scientists fed people almonds and measured how much energy their bodies extracted from the nuts.

They showed that the average energy extracted from almonds is closer to 4.6 calories per gram than the back-of-the-pack figure of 6.1 calories per gram.

That’s a staggering 32% difference between the number of calories per portion listed on a packet, and the amount of energy you’ll actually be able to access from eating them!

And it’s not just almonds. Similar experiments reveal that we’ve also overestimated the calorie contents of walnuts, pistachios, and cashews too.

Processing affects how much energy we get from nuts

When you use the absolute amount of fat in a portion of food to calculate the calories you’ll get from it, you’re assuming that you can actually access all that energy.

But the fat in whole nuts is protected by sturdy structures such as plant cell walls, which aren’t easily broken down during digestion.

Chopping, cooking, blending or even simply chewing nuts breaks down the cellular structures and releases more fat.

Generally, the more you process, the more you break down the food matrix, and the more energy will be available.

Roasting almonds increases their calorie content to 4.9 calories per gram while roasting and chopping them increases it to 5.0 calories per gram and almond butter provides 6.5 calories per gram.

What’s more, the amount of calories extracted from a handful of nuts varies hugely depending on who’s eating them.

In the USDA’s 2012 study, although the participants absorbed an average of 4.5 calories per gram from their almonds, this varied from 2 calories per gram to 6 calories per gram for different people.

So, a one-ounce portion of almonds may contain just 56 calories for one person and 168 calories for another!

So, should you go nuts?

If you only look at the fat and calories in nuts and decide not to eat them, you’ll miss out on the other benefits they offer.

Besides containing heart-healthy fats, nuts are packed with nutrients including fiber, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and many other health-enhancing plant-based compounds.

We believe that the best way to eat to maintain your health is by understanding your personal nutritional responses and finding the foods your body loves. We’ve discovered that nutritional responses to the same foods can be very different between people, even identical twins.

That’s why we’re working together with leading scientists and thousands of volunteers — combining large-scale data and machine learning to predict personal nutritional responses, so everyone can eat with confidence, nuts included.

Interested? Sign up to our early access mailing list to be the first to know how you can find the foods your body loves.