Nuts are good for you, this much is clear. Eating a variety of nuts (especially almonds and walnuts) can provide a wide variety of minerals and nutrients that your body needs, and they are tasty to boot.
Personally I have been buying raw nuts to eat as a snack because they are not very good (compared to roasted and salted nuts). Roasted and salted nuts are so tasty that I overeat them like whoa. It's a bad scene, man. Raw nuts are reasonably tasty, but not so delicious that I am tempted to eat more than a handful a day.
(Incidentally, the best source of raw nuts is, weirdly, Target. They carry a house brand Archer Farms raw premium nut mix, which contains cashews and pistachios and no peanuts. Often on sale for $5/lb because I guess I am the only one who buys them.)
If nuts are just labeled "roasted," it probably means they were roasted in oil. Not exactly deep fried, mind you, but slathered up and then heated. Although yummy, these nuts are not very healthy due to the added fat.
By comparison, "dry roasted" nuts were heated without oil. Thus, you don't get dinged for the cooking oil, nutritionally speaking.
Raw food fans and hard-core devotees of the Paleo Diet argue that roasting nuts destroys the nutrients, but there is not a lot of scientific support for this perspective. I did find that roasting nuts can release a carcinogen, but it sounds like this happens in pretty tiny amounts, so I'm not sure it's worth worrying about.
I did learn that raw almonds are a risk for salmonella, since they have not been heated. In fact, raw almonds have been banned from sale in California due to the salmonella risk. It's a pretty minimal risk compared to a lot of other foods, but children and people with compromised immune systems might want to avoid them.
Image courtesy Flickr/Nomadic Lass
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