Bit of a snack attack going on. Fresh & dried fruits with mixed nuts…. (or are they…?)
Dried fruits: dried fruit doesn’t have more sugar per piece than fresh fruit, but it does have more sugar per volume…let me explain: to make a piece of dried fruit it needs to be dehydrated, which means removing most of the water. This shrinks the fruit, meaning you’ll probably eat more dried fruit per portion than you would fresh. For example, 1 cup of grapes is 104 calories but one cup of raisins is 434 calories. Raisins are around 4 times smaller than grapes.
Some fruits like cranberries are very tart so do have sugar added, so watch out for that!
Nut or Not?
The warning “may contains nuts” on a packet of peanuts is actually totally untrue…because peanuts aren’t nuts! They’re a type of underground pea. Fun fact: it’s common for people with severe peanut allergy to be totally fine with “true nuts”. Other “not nuts” are Brazil nuts, coconuts, walnuts and cashews. These are all “drupes” which means tree-ripened.
True nuts are “a simple dry fruit with only one seed (sometimes two) in which the seed case becomes hard at maturity”. True nuts include pecans, sweet chestnuts, beech, acorns, hornbeam, hazel and alder.
So there you go!
