8 Walnut Nutrients for Your Body and Brain
Walnuts are a high fat and therefore high calorie food. Despite this, they are not only very good for your health, they can actually help you lose weight as well.
Walnut Fat Content
A quarter of a cup of walnuts contain around 16 grams of fat, of which only 1.5 grams is saturated, primarily palmitic acid. The rest is made up of omega-9 oleic acid, omega-6 linoleic acid and, compared to other nuts, an unusually high amount of omega-3 alpha linolenic acid. Being a plant food they contain no cholesterol.
Calories in Walnuts and Why They Don’t Really Matter
For those concerned with calories, there are around 25 calories in a whole walnut or two walnut halves. An ounce of walnuts, that’s usually 14 or so halves, has close to 180 calories. While a whole cup of chopped walnuts contained approximately 780 calories. That sounds like a lot, but I challenge anyone to comfortably eat that much in one sitting.
The reason counting calories alone is an ineffective way to lose weight is because it doesn’t take into account the effect particular foods have on your body and how this impacts weight loss. In the case of walnuts, they are actually one of the best foods for increasing satiety, that feeling of satisfied fullness that stops hunger dead in its tracks.
They are also rich in anti-inflammatory and antioxidant nutrients. This is important with regards to preventing weight gain as chronic inflammation is now being demonstrated to be a major cause of obesity.
Perhaps most surprising of all for some people to come to terms with, we actually need certain fats to lose fat. Particularly the one that walnut is so high in – omega-3.
Let’s dive in: 🙂
