Raw… Roasted… Sprouted?
After picking, most nuts are dried, not only to enhance flavor and add more crunch, but also to preserve them. These are what we know as raw beans. From there, the commercialization of nuts begins: with or without shell, salted or without salt, toasted, sprouted, candied, spiced, packaged or in bulk. But what happens to their nutritional content in the process of how nuts are processed?
Raw or unroasted nuts.
Contrary to popular belief, raw walnuts are not simply plucked from the trees and sold on a grocery store shelf. As mentioned above, most nuts are dried to preserve them and to enhance their flavors and textures. These are raw nuts. While raw nuts are quite nutritious and have no added fat, they are often bland and tasteless.
Raw walnuts also contain enzyme inhibitors that help protect the seed from germinating too early and dying. This also helps keep the species going. But these enzyme inhibitors, when introduced into the body, actually neutralize the enzymes that your body uses to control inflammation and aid in digestion. In fact, eating nuts with these enzyme inhibitors can cause the pancreas to become inflamed. There are only two ways to destroy these enzyme inhibitors:
- Roasting, which also destroys enzymes,
- Sprouting, which keeps beneficial enzymes intact.
roasted nuts.
While roasted nuts have a lot more artificial flavor than raw nuts, they do have some definite downsides:
- added oils,
- additives,
- Harder to digest
- Less nutritional value.
The nuts can be dry roasted or roasted in oil. As you probably already know, dry-roasted nuts contain less fat than oil-roasted nuts. In fact, roasting nuts in oil is much like frying nuts in highly saturated palm or coconut oil, adding about a gram of fat and 10 calories per ounce to already high-fat nuts and calories.2 Then Roasted nuts are often heavily salted and almost always have other ingredients added, such as sugar, corn syrup, MSG, preservatives, and other additives.
Also, many people have trouble digesting nuts due to the high fat content. Adding more fats during roasting makes them even more difficult to digest.3 Ultimately, roasting destroys most of the nutritional content of the nuts. B vitamins, particularly vitamin B1 (thiamine), which helps produce energy and keep your heart healthy, are most often removed by grilling. And grilling not only destroys enzyme inhibitors, it also destroys the enzymes the body needs to help with digestion. So roasted nuts may have more flavor than raw nuts, but at a price: your health.
sprouted walnuts
Sprouted nuts perfectly solve the nutritional problem of roasted nuts and the bad taste of raw nuts. The process dates back thousands of years and is still practiced today in non-meat-eating cultures, where nuts are a staple. This traditional process, called sprouting, does not begin with drying as in the case of raw or roasted nuts. Instead, freshly picked nuts are soaked in water and cause the nuts to start sprouting. The nuts are then removed from the solution and slowly dried at a very low temperature with low moisture.
This slow drying process destroys enzyme inhibitors, releasing the full nutritional content of the nut and allowing the body’s natural enzymes to digest the nuts more easily. This process usually takes up to a week to prepare, as in the case of well-selected almonds, where the dead nuts are rejected because they do not sprout. While it takes much longer, sprouting makes the nuts more digestible, gives them much higher nutritional value, makes them crunchier, and best of all, releases an unmistakably fresher flavor.