Friday 4 February 2011

switching to macadamias

I was eating a handful of walnuts and beef jerky as my mid-morning snack on rest days. (good fats and plenty of protein). Since then I've been reading that walnuts have a high Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio. So I'm switching to Macadamias which have just as much nutritional value, but contain hardly any Omega 6.

Omega 6 per (1/4) cup

Walnuts – 9.5 g
Almonds – 4.36 g
Cashews – 2.6 g
Macadamias – 0.5 g
Brazil nuts – 7.2 g
Hazelnuts – 2.7 g
Pistachio – 4.1 g
Pine nuts – 11.6 g
Pecans – 5.8 g

(http://www.marksdailyapple.com/nuts-omega-6-fats/)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What I don’t get, is that nuts appear to be quite high in Omega 6 fats. And I thought we were supposed to try to balance out Omega 3 & 6s. Here’s a breakdown of some common nuts, per 100g:

almonds: 49g total fat, 6mg Omega 3, 12065mg Omega 6, omega6:3 ratio: 2000:1
cashews: 44g, 63mg, 7782mg, 125:1
pecans: 72g, 986mg, 20630mg, 20:1
macadamias: 76g, 206mg, 1296mg, 6:1
walnuts: 65g, 9079mg, 38092mg, 4:1

So almonds have virtually NO omega 3 fats, buts HEAPS of omega 6 fats! Only macadamias and walnuts seem to have a reasonable ratio.

By comparison, canola oil has a 2:1 omega6:3 ratio.

So all this talk of eating lots of nuts, seems, well, NUTS! Can anyone explain this apparent contradiction?

All data comes from nutritiondata.com, which gets it from the USDA.