People can eat raw or roasted almonds as a snack, or add them to sweet or savory dishes. They are also available in slices, flakes, strips, such as flour, oil, butter or almond milk. People call almonds a nut, but they are seeds, rather than a real nut. Apparently there is a good reason to pasteurize almonds, rather than sending them raw.
Like raw milk, raw almonds can harbor foodborne diseases that make people sick. In fact, there were a series of salmonella outbreaks in the early 2000s, related to California almonds (which provides more than 80 percent of the world's almonds) that sickened hundreds of people in the United States and Canada. Whatever you call them, almonds come in many varieties and can be enjoyed in a variety of ways. They can be eaten whole as a quick snack or chopped and mixed into sweet and savory dishes.
They can be eaten raw or roasted, skinned or scalded, ground into flour or turned into delicious nut butter. But are these versatile nuts good for you? This is what happens to your body when you eat almonds every day. Yes, it's completely safe to eat raw sweet almonds. You can eat them raw, toasted, or after soaking them in water.
There is another variety of almonds called bitter almonds. This type of almond is not safe to eat raw. Bitter almonds are generally used to extract oil from almonds instead of eating them. Just keep in mind that almonds are high in calories, so you shouldn't eat more than 20 a day if you're not trying to gain weight.
But those raw almonds you're soaking in Gwyneth Paltrow-style water probably aren't as raw as you think they are. They work in conjunction with vitamin E and vitamin C found in walnut meat to help prevent oxidation of low-density lipoprotein (LDL, bad) cholesterol. Sweet almonds are considered safe to eat and more research is needed to confirm the safety of thermally processed bitter almonds. And over the past decade, pasteurizing almonds has become a common practice, but most consumers still don't know that the almond they eat has been pasteurized or how it occurs.
Almonds are a great source of both minerals: a one-ounce serving contains 14 percent of your daily copper needs and 32 percent of your manganese requirement. All California almonds, which would be virtually all almonds in the country, are heat pasteurized or treated with a fumigant. Boiling, roasting, or heating bitter almonds in the microwave can help reduce their toxin content and make them safer to eat. According to the book Healing Foods by DK Publishing, eat with your skin on, as skin flavonoids work synergistically with vitamin E to double its antioxidant power.
Well, according to the California Almond Board, “Raw almonds are pasteurized almonds that are not roasted, and almond producers are allowed to use this nomenclature on labels, however confusing it may be for consumers. If you're trying to select the healthiest option when you want to eat almonds every day, you should consider choosing raw or roasted nuts. If you eat almonds every day, you can also get some form of support if you have Alzheimer's disease or liver disease. Mold Contamination Seems More Likely in Unsalted Raw Walnuts Compared to Roasted and Salted Varieties.
Steam pasteurization, for example, is a process by which almonds are jetted with heat, as the name suggests, from steam to kill any potentially harmful bacteria, but a steamed pasteurized almond has basically been cooked at 165°F and therefore cannot be really raw, even if the nut has never it gets roasted before it gets to you. By law, all almonds produced in the United States must be pasteurized, even if they are labeled “raw”. So what do you eat when you eat a raw almond? And what does raw mean when it comes to almonds? .
