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/)

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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.

25 April 2011 at 17:37

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