Low Fat Substitutes for Cooking with Nuts

Low Fat Substitutes for Cooking with Nuts
Hi my name is Kirsten Herbes, I’m a registered dietician and health educator. Another main source of fat in our food comes from the fat that we add via the form of nuts, whether it’s in baking recipes or cooking recipes. Nuts a lot of times are used in holiday recipes because they provide great flavor and a lot of crunch to baked goods that we tend to make around the holidays including baked dishes like casseroles. Nuts unfortunately are composed of about 65 percent fat which means when you eat nuts, we tend to eat a lot more than we should and we tend to eat a lot of calories and fat grams as a result. There are easy substitutions if you still want to have the same effect, the same flavor, the same texture but you want to forego some of the fat, the easiest one to reach for is a cereal such as a grape nuts, it’s a heavier grain, it’s a crunchy cereal, if you play with this and you put this in you food instead of the nutty part that you would usually put in, you’re cutting out all of the fat grams but you’re still getting the same crunch and the same texture that you would get from say a ground walnut or something similar. Another good alternative is to use quick cooking oats and this happens to be a quick cooking packet of oats right here, so you’ll see it has some other items added such as raisins, which is actually a very good alternative for the nuts because you’re adding more flavor and you’re maintaining that crunch. As quick cooking oats bake in the oven, they tend to get a lot harder than they would if you cooked them in a microwave or you boiled them in water, so you will get that same crunchy effect that you would have from the nuts originally. If you don’t want to forego the nuts at all and you do really like the flavor of nuts, you want to try to stick to something such as a walnut, an almond, a hazelnut, these nuts tend to be a little bit lower in fat and the type of fat you’re getting is monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fat. These types of fats help you reduce your cholesterol, your bad cholesterol, help increase your good cholesterol so you’re at least getting some nutritional benefit. By all means, you want to stay away from brazil nuts, cashews and macadamia nuts because those are simply high in fat with very little nutritional value.