Nuts Don’t Have As Many Calories As You Might Think.
Whole nuts have fewer calories than previously thought. Over the years, research has accumulated to support this fact, but now food labels are starting to change. For example, one KIND strip that used to be 200 calories will now be labeled with 180 calories .
KIND told me via email that they consider themselves the first snack brand to change their labels. Most brands pull their calorie data from a USDA database that has not yet been updated, but the scientific evidence behind calorie reduction is accepted.
How did we misunderstand the calorie content of nuts?
Calorie is a measure of energy. If you had a cool science teacher in high school, you might remember that you could burn food – literally set it on fire – and measure the temperature of a glass of water over the fire. The hotter the water gets, the more fuel there was in this Dorito or in what you burned.
The human body is a little different from the fire in the classroom, but we have known for over 100 years that our body can get about 9 healthy calories from every gram of fat in our food, 4 calories from every gram of protein and soon. Over the years, scientists have tweaked the calculations to accommodate the fact that each food is digested differently.
But until recently, no one looked too closely at whole nuts.
They figured it out with a really rough experiment (sorry)
Nuts, being parts of plants, are made up of cells. These cells have cell walls. The cell walls of the nuts are especially tough, which is why the nuts crunch so nicely. But this also means that some nutrients, especially fats, are blocked inside cells, and our digestive system may not always be able to release all of them. Whether you eat chopped nuts or chopped nuts in almond oil, you are getting almost all of the healthy foods. But whole nuts often leave your body, and many of the cells containing the nutrients remain intact.
I think you understand where we are heading. In a series of recent experiments, USDA researchers forced people to eat specific diets with and without nuts. They dried and burned the food these people ate, and then they did the same with their feces to find out how many calories were left after digestion.
The experiments were more detailed, but this is the main idea. Participants were required to store all of their urine and feces in the refrigerator between trips to the lab. Thank you, brave souls, for making your contribution to science.
What does this mean for me, a nut lover?
Results: Cashews have 16% fewer calories than previously thought, walnuts 21% fewer and almonds 32% fewer .
Although nuts are lower in calories, updating the label on KIND bars does not change macronutrients – for example, grams of fat stays the same. The representative told us that this is because the content of nutrients – fat, protein, vitamins, etc. – is indicated at the level that was measured in the food itself. Thus, your body does not digest as much fat as previously thought, but the number of grams of fat on the label remains the same. In other words, the numbers don’t add up, but the label is written that way.
An interesting detail, if you’re reading the studies, is that not everyone got the same amount of calories from nuts: while there were 137 calories in one serving of cashews, that’s on average – one person got 105 calories from one serving, while the other got 151. All bodies are different, a reminder that calorie counting will never be accurate (for this and several other reasons ).
So, if you eat whole nuts, they are not as high in calories as you probably thought. This is useful if you are tracking calories and eating whole bowls of nuts.
Updated 1/15/2020 3:08 PM to include information from a KIND representative on why macronutrient labeling has not changed.