Fact or Fiction?

graj0 said:

The internet is a great place for learning things and I was interested in the link posted by bantingnetwork for Almond bread. It looked very nice and I wanted to know exactly how many carbs, how much fat and how many calories. So I was quite happy to while away 1/2 hr looking at the individual ingredients and ran into problems straight away because by Googling "carbs in Almond flour" one of the first few links was one entitled "5 Reasons to avoid almond flour" which I followed, I'm curious, people have been telling me how wonderful this stuff is, what's so bad. The bit that troubled me was what it said about polyunsaturated fats and 20% fat in almonds is meant to be PUFAS. It's supposed be responsible for the following:

• suppress mitochondrial energy production. In non-chemistry language, in other words, slows down the metabolism
• encourage an inflammatory response in the body
• cause digestive issues by impairing the action of certain digestive enzymes
• slow down thyroid function
• inhibit detoxification enzymes
• deplete antioxidants in the body
• inhibit production of progesterone and androgens while activating production of estrogen. This encourages estrogen-dominancy in the body and this contributes to many health issues like weight gain, PMS, hormonal acne and more.

Looks like my 1/2 hour is turning into 1/2 day because some of those claims, if completely true, will certainly discourage me from using almond flour. The trouble is that I can't just believe the first thing I read, I have to be able to substantiate it, perhaps it's just me. It certainly started when I studied Information Systems at Brunel when I was in my early 50s and it was impressed upon all students that the internet was full of rubbish and not to believe everything you read and references to URLs were unacceptable unless referring to academic papers. It seems coconut flour is better. I wonder how long it will take me to find substantiating evidence for that?

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Hi graj0, I know just what you mean, you can spend hours reading opinions and "facts" on the internet that directly contradict one another on just about any subject you care to name. It seems to me you can either A. do hours of research, or B. pick your horse and stick with it. Either way people are gonna disagree with your findings, good luck mate!

Check facts, first the predominant fat in almonds is monounsaturated.The polyunsaturated is actually higher than 20% of the fat content
3.7g, saturated,
12 g polyunsaturated
31 g monounsaturated .
( for comparison lard has 11g of polyunsaturated fat in 100g but of course it contains more fat so this will be a smaller percentage of the total fat)

The only essential fats are those that the body actually requires because it can't make them .These happen to be polyunsaturated fatty acids, omega 3 and 6. You need some of each so avoiding them completely would be rather foolish
Many people do suggest that too high a proportion of omega 6 to omega 3 is not healthy. Almonds contain omega 6 rather than 3.
If you started eating large amounts of ground almonds then it is possible that the calories from these foods might replace calories from other sources .This could result in calories from omega 3 containing foods being reduced so alter the ratios unfavourably. (lots of ifs,it all depends on what you eat and amounts involved)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratio_of_fatty_acids_in_different_foods
( the UK actually commisioned research into the ratios and decided it wasn't at all a useful concept . They concluded that advice should continue to be aimed at increasing foods containing omega 3 rather than try to attain some sort of miracle ratio .That's one reason why you are advised to increase the amount of oily fish.)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18039412)
Lastly There are quite a lot of small scale trials on the effect of almonds upon inflammation showing neutral effects on some markers but beneficial ones on others.
http://scholar.google.fr/scholar?q=almonds+inflammation&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_ylo=2011
( but the trials I looked at only supplemented with relatively small amouts of whole nuts, not large amounts of ground up ones)

Phoenix you're a star. Thank you! Voice of perspective, what we all long for.

Some people think that we eat more fat today, than earlyer. Thats wrong:

http://www.nutritionjrnl.com/article/S0899-9007(15)00077-5/abstract