The science of human nutrition is always on the move. Knowledge is continuously becoming more and more complete.
Nuts and peanuts do make an important contribution to human nutrition and health. Indeed, nuts and peanuts are central to discussions on dietary fibres, vitamins, minerals, plant sterols, unsaturated fatty acids and essential amino acids.
Nuts and peanuts have a key role to play in enhancing the nutritional value of snacks and cereals and a variety of other foods. Nuts and peanuts are natural products and are extremely diverse.
Depending on their variety or type, they offer many benefits in the manufacture of cereals and snacks, providing attributes such as crunch, texture, taste, snap, colour, functional recipe binding and evident health aspects to the finished product.
Although nuts are relatively high in fat, it is an important fact that most of the fat is unsaturated.
Consequently, nuts that grow on trees and peanuts can play an essential part in an overall healthy diet. The monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats found mainly in plant foods such as nuts, often form parts of diets for decreasing low-density lipoprotein (LDL or abad' cholesterol) levels.
Health research indicates that a total intake of 3050 grams of nuts per day is recommended.
Healthy and tasty snacking is the focus. The compatibility of nuts and peanuts is very good in many consumer products.
New developments are going on for unique crunchiness, in the just launched GRANUPO range and improved keeping qualities. For peanuts IMKO Ingredients even combined the two developments.
Each nut has such rich and complex flavours, its own texture and appeal that a portion of a few grams is satisfying and enough to add an interest to just about any dish or snack.
Nutritional balance brings product developers new challenges to use (pea)nuts in formulations of tomorrow.
Many trend developments are going on and peeks are found with crunch, sugar/honey coated nuts, GRANUPO and cashew, pecan, peanut and macadamia applications.
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IMKO Ingredients is based in Doetinchem, The Netherlands. www.thenutcompany.com
