Not long ago I posted a recipe for homemade, healthy Nutella, and it quickly became one of the most visited posts on the blog.
Now, healthy Nutella is not nearly so hard to come by! Justin's Nut Butters has a chocolate hazelnut butter that totally hits the spot, and is made from all the right stuff.
Justin makes peanut and almond butter as well, but I'm choosing to highlight the hazelnut variety since you all loved the homemade Nutella recipe. Plus, of the three types of nuts Justin uses, hazelnuts are the ones with the best ratio for correcting the type of fatty acid imbalance that is so prevalent in PCOS.
For those of you who travel, or who are looking for easy, portable snacks to throw in your gym bag, this product is also packaged in 0.5 oz packs.
This is one product we found at Expo West that is readily available in many grocery stores, not just high-end natural foods venues. If you can't find it, here's a link to order
Oh, by the way, we got to meet the REAL Justin too! This is, to a foodie, the equivalent of a rock and roll groupie meeting Jon Bon Jovi. It's the (nut butter) bomb.
Happy to report, Justin is just as nice as he is tall!
Hazelnuts have always been around my house. When I was a little girl we even had a dog who knew how to crack them open and enjoy the kernel inside! They're a common ingredient in holiday cooking, which has me thinking of hazelnuts a lot right now.
Hazelnuts are not as commonly known in the United States as other nuts, but they are a great PCOS-friendly food to become acquainted with. Hazelnuts are very high in monounsaturated fatty acids, putting them in a category similar to macadamia nuts, olives, and avocadoes.
In addition, they are a good source of iron, calcium, zinc, and potassium.
You can enjoy them the way Coco used to, simply cracking them open and eating them, or you can grind them into powder to use in baked goods, breading for fish and poultry, and salad dressings…anywhere you might use ground flaxseeds. (I like the way my coffee tastes after I've ground hazelnuts then coffee in my coffee grinder!)
Here's a great recipe for hazelnut pad thai from the Hazelnut Council. To make it even more PCOS friendly, try it with Shirataki Noodles and use either hazelnut oil or canola oil for cooking.
I was recently asked about whether or not Nutella was healthy for PCOS. Compared to some other choices, it's not really so bad. Hazelnuts are a good source of monounsaturated fats, and folate. However, it has added sugar and palm oil, which are not ingredients you should be consuming on a regular basis.
I found a healthy hazelnut spread recipe online which looks easy to make. The palm oil has been replaced with canola oil. I encourage you to undercut the amount of sugar, say start with 1/2 cup, and increase to taste, to see how little you can get away with.
This time of year hazelnut powder is available at Trader Joe's, which makes this recipe even easier.
Oh, boy, this German girl is happy to know one of her faves is back on the radar!
Over the weekend, I had the honor and pleasure of training the newest members of the inCYST network. I'll share more about them in another post!
I realized while doing that training that there is something I always share in professional presentations, that I have yet to post on this blog. It has to do with my perspective about the fact that walnuts consistently show up on every blog post and in every interview about increasing the omega-3's in your diet…and when you do the math…it turns out there may be some other great choices, potentially even better choices, than walnuts for doing this job.
TRUE Walnuts have the highest amount of omega-3 fatty acids per gram of nut than any other nut, about 2.5 grams per ounce.
TRUE Walnuts also have a very high amount of omega-6 fatty acids per gram of nut, about 10 grams per ounce.
TRUE Walnuts have an omega-6 to omega-3 ratio of 4 to 1. If this was the only food we ever ate, this is actually a decent ratio.
HOWEVER…The problem is, when people are trying to use diet for help with inflammatory diseases like PCOS, their ultimate goal is to simultaneously reduce omega-6 intake and increase omega-3 intake. Every time you eat walnuts, you increase both omega-3 and omega-6 intake.
NUTTY STRATEGIES FOR BALANCING OMEGA-3'S AND OMEGA-6'S 1. Don't eliminate walnuts! They still, in moderation, have a lot of great health benefits.
2. Eat a variety of nuts. I like to shop at a store that has bulk food bins. Every week they have a different nut on sale. I went to IKEA and bought a bunch of see-through canisters. Every week I purchase a pound of whatever is on sale and add it to my collection. That way I can snack on almonds, cashews, macadamias, pecans…and always have them on hand for cooking or salads. That way I get the best each nut has to offer, while minimizing potential problems that might arise from getting too much of one kind of nut.
3. Know your anti-inflammatory nuts. If correcting your omega-6 to omega-3 ratio is your current most important goal, get friendly with the following nuts: macadamia, hazelnut, pecan, pine, pistachio. I ranked them in order of which ones have the highest ratio of omega-3 and monounsaturated fats compared to omega-6 and saturated fats. (Thanks to friend and colleague Johanna Roth for helping with that analysis).
Each of these types of nuts, has an anti-inflammmatory benefit related to its fat profile. Peanuts, peanut oil, and old-fashioned style (no trans fat) peanut butter are pretty neutral, won't hurt your ratio, but won't really improve it. (Peanut butter is a great and inexpensive choice, and is perfect when eaten in an overall diet that also includes fish, flax, and other omega-3 balancing choices.)
(Monounsaturated fats are mathematically neutral and healthfully beneficial. They are the type of fats also found in olive oil and avocados).
Most people who recommend walnuts as part of their Top Ten List of Foods have not taken the time to do all of the math. They simply stopped at the basic analysis.
Way back in the early 80's when I was a brand-new dietitian, we were taught to teach our clients to avoid nuts because of their high fat content. Today, nuts are the new health food. But research is often written up in ways that place a specific nut in the spotlight, without a big-picture perspective.
For example: Walnuts are routinely listed as"the" nut to eat because of their high omega-3 content. Most people do not realize that the omega-6 content of walnuts is so high that it is mathematically impossible to improve your dietary omega-6 to omega-3 ratio by eating only walnuts and no other nuts. Does that mean you shouldn't eat walnuts? Absolutely not! In all honesty, it is mathematically impossible to improve your omega-6 to omega-3 ratio with any nut. It is, however, yet another example of the imbalances we create when we focus on a handful of"super foods" and don't pursue variety.
Being the statistics nerd that I am, I spent the other afternoon looking at 10 different nuts in several different ways. I came to some interesting conclusions. Let me work you through what I did. I don't mean to be tedious, I just want to be transparent so anyone else can work through the analysis just as I did. If you're just looking for what nuts are best to eat,simply skip to the bottom of this post.
1. Analysis one: Best anti-inflammatory index (potential for a food to prevent or promote inflammation, as indexed at http://www.nutritiondata.com/), ranked in order of best to worst: macadamia hazelnut almond cashew peanut pistachio Brazil pecan walnut pine 2. Analysis two: Omega-3 fatty acid content, ranked from highest to lowest per ounce of nuts: walnut pecan pine pistachio macadamia cashew hazelnut Brazil peanut almond Important point of interest: almonds are the only nut that contain absolutely NO omega-3 fatty acids. 3. Analysis 3: Omega-6 to omega-3 ratio, ranked from lowest (most beneficial) to highest (least beneficial) walnut macadamia Brazil pecan cashew pistachio hazelnut pine peanut almond 4. Analysis 4: Total omega-3 and monounsaturated fat content, ranked from highest (most beneficial) to lowest macadamia hazelnut pecan almond cashew brazil peanut pistachio pine walnut 5. Analysis 5: Total saturated fat content, ranked from lowest (most beneficial) to highest walnut almond hazelnut pine pistachio pecan peanut cashew macadamia Brazil SUMMARY ANALYSIS: In each list, I placed a number"1" next to the top item, and numbered each nut below it in numerical order. Then I added up the scores for each nut based on their rank in each category. The lowest score shows the overall rank. This helps nuts that many not have one outstanding quality still receive a decent ranking--it gets credit, in other words, for being all-around pretty good without being written off for having one quality that is considered"bad" striking it off as"unhealthy". It also keeps a nut with one outstanding quality for getting too much credit when there may be nutritional aspects that truly keep it from being a superfood. The final rankings, with the most potentially beneficial at the top: macadamia hazelnut walnut pecan cashew almond/pistachio (tied) Brazil/pine (tied) peanut I guess you could say…just like people, all nuts have their good and not-so-great qualities. By spending too much time with one, you'll miss out on the benefits of the others. Diversify your interests, and you'll get the best benefit.
