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The 50% Fat Snack that could help you Lose Weight
Relax, it’s not olive oil smoothies.
As prefaced, nutrition can be counter-intuitive. When trying to find enjoyable, nutritious snacks between meals, we are often more at the mercy of effective marketing or personal habits instead of unbiased information. So why not approach snacking afresh with food that may improve blood pressure, free fatty acid profile and many other unseen parameters, even though it’s loaded with a fair bit of fat.
Almonds, the magical snack in question, are approximately 50% fat (1). Fat content in many popular nuts range from 46–74% (2), but nut consumption is associated with protection from weight gain (1) and heart disease (3). Eating more than 5 servings of 28 grams of nuts weekly, including almonds, decreases the risk of coronary heart disease by up to 50% (3). Shouldn’t a high-fat food increase your body weight when you eat it?
The strange phenomenon is that almond fats of whole almonds remain mostly unavailable to digestion, and some fairly “messy” studies have shown this. Putting chewed almond matter under a microscope showed that the majority of fat content in almonds stayed encapsulated inside the nut’s cell walls (4). Later studies confirmed that the fat inside the nut cell walls remain inaccessible to the body and indigestible.
