So why does the nutritional value of the food that we eat vary from brand to brand, country to country or even farm to farm, well for that matter, from garden to garden? Well there are three basic things to bear in mind here.
The first is that when you're dealing with crops that are grown intensively or on a commercial basis - chiefly things like nuts - even though they're often taken from the same tree, the nutrients will vary. Those that you find in the nut will be directly proportional to the nutrients available to the tree as it produces the nuts. Now as the tree can't move, it is obviously dependent on the nutrients being brought to it. The chief way in which that happens in nature is that the water flowing through the soil will be the major carrier of the nutrients that eventually goes through the tree and end up in the nut. Just taking water as an example, you'll see that the amount of water a tree gets when it's producing nuts will determine how much water ends up in the nut. So in wet areas for instance each nut will have proportionally more water in it. That means it will have proportionally less, fat, less protein and less carbohydrate. So you can very quickly see that even just looking at something as simple as water content - that will obviously change from tree to tree, farm to farm, country to country and continent to continent.
The other thing that affects the nutritional value are things like the quality of the soil. Nuts produced from trees grown in rich soil will have a greater range of nutrients, vitamins and minerals for instance. Also the age of the tree will have quite a considerable bearing on the nutrient balance of the nuts that particular tree produces over its lifetime. What is grown around the tree will have a similar effect. Plants that deplete the soil of the nutrients the tree needs will reduce the nutritional value and plants that enrich the soil will increase its nutritional value. I think now you're beginning to understand just why in a natural product like nuts or any other thing that's grown, the nutritional value will vary.
The other thing that will determine the final nutritional value of something like a nut is whether it is raw or cooked and even the manner of cooking. For instance, heat treated nuts will have an increase in things like trans fats. Nuts that are dry roasted will have fat leached out of them. Nuts that are roasted in oil will absorb more oil and nuts that are boiled will have less oil and a higher water content. So you can see there are legitimate reasons exactly why the nutritional value of the nuts that you eat changes, even the raw ones. So there will always be slight variations and I suspect the best way to deal with it is to take the highest value just to be on the safe side.
Of course when it comes to nuts it only really matters if you're eating large quantities of them and that is always the problems with nuts, isn't it? They're just too damn moreish.
