Acorns have an excellent number of health benefits, including their ability to safeguard the heart, boost energy, improve food digestion, regulate blood sugar level levels, build strong bones, assist with repair and growth, soothe inflammation, eliminate diarrhea, and protect the skin.
When most people hear the word “acorn”, they no longer consider a feasible food source for humans, however this was not constantly the case. An acorn is the nut of an oak tree, or one of their typical family members in the Quercus or Lithocarpus genera. An acorn consists of a single nut in a hard external shell, generally topped by a cupule, which is where the nut connects to the oak branch.
You can discover them falling from oak trees throughout the Northern hemisphere, or perhaps being gathered by squirrels for their winter food stockpile. However, acorns used to be an important dietary staple for numerous early cultures, as they were extensively available and served a number of the same dietary needs as grains do today. In fact, acorns are still used in some cultures in specialized meals, most notably by Korean and Native Americans.
Acorns have a rich content of tannins that make their taste rather bitter, but there are a number of ways to remove that undesirable taste, consisting of boiling and soaking the nuts in water till they stop turning the water brown. Acorns have been used more recently as a replacement for coffee, where the bitterness wasn’t as unfavorable.
Acorns can be ground into a flour and baked into breads, muffins, and other food where grain flour is generally used. Regardless of the accessibility of grains and their comparable nutritional value, acorns are still sometimes consumed due to their high fat, protein, carbohydrate, mineral, and vitamin content. Now, let’s take a better take a look at the unanticipated health advantages of acorns.
Health Benefits Of Acorns
Skin Health
There are a number of ways in which acorns are used to secure the skin, consisting of as an astringent representative, however this requires the tannins directly leached from the acorns. As soon as you soak or boil the nuts in water, the rich tannin water can be topically used to the skin in order to relieve burns and rashes, to speed healing of cuts and wounds, and to reduce inflammation or burns. This topical application of nutrient-rich water can likewise be used to topically treat pains and pains.
Food Digestion
Like many nuts, acorns have a substantial amount of fiber, makings them ideal for enhancing your digestive health. Fiber helps to control your bowel movements and eliminate both constipation and diarrhea. This is perfect for individuals experiencing irregular defecation, cramping, bloating, and other gastrointestinal distress.
Diabetes Prevention
One of the most crucial benefits of acorns is their capability to control sugar levels in the body, hence preventing the hazardous spikes and plunges of glucose that can result in diabetes, or endanger those currently experiencing that disease. The fiber content and reasonably intricate carbohydrates discovered in these nuts are the factor for this regulatory benefit.
Heart Health
Many nuts are high in fat, and while the majority of those are advantageous, for people wishing to cut down on their general fat content, acorns can be an excellent alternative. There is roughly 5 times more unsaturated fats as saturated fats in these nuts (typically), which likewise enhances total cholesterol balance and avoids obesity, atherosclerosis, and other hazardous conditions that threaten the heart as a result of hydrogenated fats.
Energy Levels
There is a high level of complex carbs discovered in acorns, which supplies longer-lasting energy reserves when taken in. The flour and the nuts are much better options than “empty carbohydrates” or easy sugars, which offer short bursts of energy, unlike the longer, continual energy boost that you receive from a lot of nuts.
Bone Health
The excellent mix of minerals discovered in acorns, which includes phosphorous, potassium and calcium, helps to increase bone health and avoid the beginning of osteoporosis. Calcium is among the most crucial minerals for bone mineral density, and is discovered in high concentrations within acorns.
Metabolic Activity
One of the key functions of the B-family vitamins depends on the metabolic activities of the body. These oak nuts might be small, but they are packed with B vitamins, including niacin, thiamin, riboflavin and vitamin B12. By ensuring that your metabolic needs are taken care of, acorns can help regulate a number of enzymatic procedures in the body that are essential for total health.
Recovery, Repair, and Growth
Proteins are key components to a healthy lifestyle, and acorns consist of a high portion of protein. This can be crucial for the production of brand-new tissues and cells, along with the repair of damaged areas and fast healing following injury or disease.
How to Use Acorn Nuts
All acorns should be leached with water to eliminate bitter. Getting those tannins out is the big barrier to cooking with acorns. However it ain’t no big deal.
Grind the raw acorns into flour, then blend 1 cup of acorn meal to 3 cups water. Pour this all into a glass jar with a cover and put it in the refrigerator. Every day you shake the container, wait 12 hours or more, then put off the water– and the tannins.
For how long? Anywhere from a week to two weeks, depending upon how bitter your acorns are. This is a good way to seep acorns without using fuel for boiling water, and you do not denature a particular starch in the acorns that acts a little like the gluten in flour, i.e., it helps the flour stick to itself.
If you intend on baking with the acorn flour, use the cold-water leaching approach.
When your acorns are without tannins, you have to find out what to do with them. Regardless, you have to dry them first or they will rot. Huge pieces can be patted dry on a tea towel. If it is hot out, lay the acorns out on cookie sheets and dry in the sun. You might likewise put them in an oven set on “warm.” You can also put the acorns in a dehydrator set on low heat.
You can likewise freeze your fresh acorn meal. Shop dried flour in jars in the refrigerator. Why the refrigerator? What fat there is in acorns will go rancid quite fast if you left the flour at space temperature.
Health Tips
That said, even “sweet” acorns ought to be seeped to remove what tannins exist in them due to the fact that several studies show that unleached acorns can make you constipated and can damage your teeth.
Tannins aren’t the only thing that alters species of acorn various. Acorns can range in fat content from 1.1 percent to 31.3 percent, protein from 2.3 percent to 8.6 percent, and carbohydrates from 32.7 percent to 89.7 percent.
What does it suggest? It means that in the kitchen area you treat acorns from various species extremely, extremely in a different way. A fatty acorn will make a meal, like ground almonds. A carb-rich acorn– like Valley Oak acorns– makes a drier flour, more like chestnut or chickpea flour (acorns lack gluten therefore will not rise.)
Excessive intake of these nuts can cause queasiness and indigestion due to the tannin content, so constantly make sure that you high the acorns to eliminate those bitter parts. Boiling the nuts will reduce the effects of more nutrients and hence reduce the health advantages.
Good luck! Have a nice weekend.
