Everything You Never Knew About Nuts transcript

Today, I'm going to explain every nut. Walnuts, almonds, cashews, pistachios, and a few you've probably never thought twice about. Some of these aren't actually nuts. Some are radioactive, and one of them will leave a metallic taste in your mouth for 2 weeks. Walnuts. Romans called them Jupiter's acorns, not because they tasted good, but because they were considered too precious to have an ordinary name. Medieval Europeans noticed something strange about them.

The shell looks like a skull. Crack it open, and the wrinkled kernel inside looks exactly like a human brain. Two hemispheres, folds, and all. They took this as a sign from God that walnuts must cure head ailments. They were wrong about the cure. Or but they were weirdly right that walnuts affect the brain. Modern research shows the omega-3 fatty acids in walnuts reduce inflammation, and some studies link regular walnut consumption to slower cognitive decline.

Walnuts are the only nut that contains ALA, a plant-based omega-3. That's part of why people who eat nuts regularly have lower rates of heart disease. There are two main types: English walnuts, which are the ones you buy at the store, thin shell, mild flavor, and black walnuts, which are native to North America, have an almost overwhelming earthy bitterness, and are so hard to crack that most people don't bother. Evidence shows humans were eating walnuts over 8,000 years ago in Persia, modern-day Iran, one of the oldest foods in this entire video.

Almonds. Here's the first thing to know. Almonds are not actually nuts. They're the seed of a fruit, a close relative of peaches, plums, and cherries. The part you eat is technically the pit. The word almond comes from the Greek word amygdala, which is also the name of the almond-shaped structure deep inside your brain that controls fear and emotion. Same word, same shape. Completely different thing, I but it's a strange connection that's been sitting in plain sight for centuries.

Almonds originally came from the Middle East and spread westward along the Silk Road. Spanish missionaries brought them to California in the 1700s. That turned out to be one of the most consequential agricultural decisions in American history. California now produces about 80% of the entire world's almond supply. The whole global market runs through one state. There are actually two types of almond, sweet almonds, which are what you eat, and bitter almonds, which contain a compound that breaks down into hydrogen cyanide, toxic unless heavily processed.

They look identical. Early farmers had to learn the hard way which trees were which. Today, almonds are the most consumed tree nut in America, more than walnuts, more than cashews, more than anything else on this list. Peanuts, not a nut. Peanuts are legumes, the same family as lentils, chickpeas, and green beans. The reason they get lumped in with nuts is purely culinary. The nutrition profile is similar. The use is similar.

But botanically, they're closer to a bean than a walnut. What makes peanuts genuinely strange is how they grow. The plant flowers above ground. After pollination, the flower stalk physically bends downward, pushes into the soil, and the peanut pod develops underground. It's called geocarpy, and peanuts are one of the only crops in the world that does this. Peanuts were cultivated in South America over 7,000 years ago.

Portuguese traders brought them to Africa. Enslaved Africans brought them to North America. And in the early 1900s, George Washington Carver, a scientist and former slave, developed over 300 uses for the peanut plant, from plastics to ink to cosmetics, transforming it into one of the most economically important crops in the American South. Peanuts have more protein than any other item on this list. They're also one of the best plant sources of folate, critical during pregnancy.

Cashews. You have never seen a cashew in its shell, and there's a very specific reason for that. The cashew grows attached to the bottom of a fleshy fruit called a cashew apple. The apple is sweet, juicy, and popular in Brazil, but it spoils within 24 hours of being picked, which is why it's never exported. What most people don't know is that between the cashew's outer shell and the nut itself, there's a layer of oil called urushiol, the exact same compound that makes poison ivy cause a rash.

If you cracked open a raw cashew shell with your bare hands, you'd blister. Workers who process cashews, primarily in Vietnam and India, the world's top producers, have to roast the shells first to neutralize the oil. Many still suffer burns. So, when you see raw cashews at the store, they're not raw. They've been heat-treated. A truly raw cashew would be dangerous to eat. Cashews are native to northeastern Brazil. Portuguese colonizers spread them to India and Africa in the 1500s.

On the nutrition side, cashews have the highest iron content of any nut on this list. About a third of Americans are iron deficient without knowing it. Cashews are one of the easier fixes. Pecans. One of the only nuts native to North America. The name comes from an Algonquin word meaning a nut that requires a stone to crack. Indigenous peoples across the Mississippi River Valley relied on them heavily as a calorie source through winter.

Ground into paste, pressed for oil. Thomas Jefferson had pecan trees planted at Monticello. He sent bags of them as gifts to George Washington. But the person most responsible for the modern pecan industry isn't someone you've likely heard of. His name was Antoine. He was an enslaved man working on a Louisiana plantation in the 1870s. Antoine developed a grafting technique that allowed growers to reliably reproduce the best pecan varieties.

Before that, pecan trees were essentially wild and unpredictable. His method became the foundation of commercial pecan farming. He received no credit, no compensation, and no recognition during his lifetime. Today, the US produces about 80% of the world's pecans, mostly from Georgia and Texas. Pecan trees live for up to 300 years and can grow over 100 ft tall. They also have the highest antioxidant content of any tree nut, more than walnuts, more than almonds.

The American Heart Association calls them a standout nut. Pistachios. 9,000 years of cultivation. They're one of the only nuts mentioned in the Bible, specifically in Genesis, listed among the best products of the land of Canaan. Legend says the Queen of Sheba was so obsessed with pistachios that she declared the entire regional harvest the exclusive property of the royal court. Commoners were not allowed to grow or consume them.

Whether that's historically accurate is debatable, but it tells you how pistachios were regarded. The nuts naturally split open as they ripen. The shell cracks along a seam, making a soft popping sound. Ancient Persians believed that if you were standing under a pistachio tree at night and heard the nuts cracking open, it was a sign of good fortune. The groves apparently made noise after dark. Assyrian immigrant named Salle Shaheen brought pistachio seedlings to California in the 1930s.

It took nearly 50 years before those trees produced enough to support a commercial industry. Today, California and Iran trade places as the world's top producers, depending on the year. Nutritionally, pistachios have the highest protein content of any tree nut. They also contain lutein, a compound that protects the retina. A 2025 study found that regular pistachio consumption measurably reduces the risk of age-related macular degeneration, one of the leading causes of blindness in older Americans.

Hazelnuts, also called filberts. The name filbert reportedly comes from Saint Philibert, a French monk whose feast day falls in late August, right at the start of hazelnut harvest season. Farmers started calling the nuts after the saint. The name stuck for centuries. Hazelnuts have been eaten since prehistoric times. Archaeologists found evidence of large-scale hazelnut processing at a site in Scotland dating back 9,000 years.

Pits full of burned shells suggesting organized industrial-scale roasting. Turkey produces about 70% of the world's hazelnuts. The climate along the Black Sea coast is nearly perfect for them, the right combination of humidity, temperature, and soil. That geographical concentration means the global Nutella supply chain runs almost entirely through one narrow strip of Turkish coastline. Which brings us to Nutella. It was invented during World War II.

An Italian pastry maker named Pietro Ferrero was trying to stretch his limited cocoa supply, which had become scarce and expensive during the war. He blended hazelnuts into the chocolate to bulk it up. The ratio was mostly hazelnuts, a little cocoa, some sugar. People loved it. The recipe became Nutella. A single hazelnut tree can live and produce nuts for over 100 years. Macadamia nuts, native to Australia, indigenous Australians had been eating them for thousands of years before European contact.

When a Scottish-Australian scientist named John Macadam began promoting them in the 1850s, the nuts were named after him, not the people who discovered them. The macadamia shell is the hardest of any commercial nut. It requires over 300 lb of pressure per square inch to crack. For context, that's roughly the bite force of a large dog. No native Australian animal can reliably crack them. There's one species of parrot that has figured it out, but that's it.

Macadamias essentially evolved to be uncrackable, which from the tree's perspective is a failed strategy. An Australian businessman brought the trees to Hawaii in the 1880s and planted the first commercial orchards there. Hawaiian macadamia nuts became internationally famous throughout the 20th century. The trees take 7 to 10 years to produce their first harvest. Only two of the nine macadamia species produce edible nuts.

All of this, the difficulty of cracking, the slow growing cycle, the limited edible species, the labor-intensive explains why macadamias are consistently among the most expensive nuts in the world. 80% of their fat is monounsaturated, the same type found in olive oil, and one of the most heart-healthy fats you can eat. Brazil nuts. These come almost entirely from wild trees in the Amazon rainforest, not farmed, not cultivated, wild.

And there's a specific reason humans have never been able to successfully domesticate them at scale. Brazil nut trees can only be pollinated by a single species of orchid bee, a large-bodied bee that's strong enough to pry open the flower. That bee only survives in undisturbed old-growth rainforest, which means the moment you clear land to plant Brazil nut trees in an orchard, you eliminate the bees' habitat and the trees don't get pollinated.

The entire agricultural model breaks down. The nuts grow inside pods the size of a coconut, hard woody shells that contain 12 to 24 individual nuts arranged like orange segments. Each pod weighs up to 5 lb. They fall from trees that can reach 160 ft tall. Harvesters on the ground wait for the pods to fall naturally. Getting hit by one is not a minor injury. Brazil nuts are naturally radioactive. The trees have extremely deep roots that absorb radium from the soil more than almost any other plant.

The radioactivity is detectable but too low to cause harm. Still enough to occasionally trigger radiation sensors at customs checkpoints. One to two Brazil nuts per day gives you your entire recommended daily intake of selenium, a mineral critical for thyroid function. Eating a large quantity regularly risks selenium toxicity. Pine nuts, edible seeds from specific species of pine tree. Not all pines produce edible seeds.

Only about 20 of the roughly 120 pine species produce nuts large enough to be worth harvesting. Harvesting them is one of the most labor-intensive processes in the food industry. Workers collect pine cones, often by climbing trees, sometimes by shaking branches, sometimes by waiting for them to fall. The cones then have to be dried, cracked open, and the tiny seeds extracted individually. One experienced harvester might collect 25 to 30 lb of nuts in a full day.

That's why they're expensive. Indigenous peoples in the American Southwest relied on pine nuts as a calorie-dense winter staple for thousands of years. Mediterranean cultures have used them in cooking since ancient Rome. They're a foundational ingredient in Italian pesto. Then there's pine mouth. A small percentage of people who eat certain varieties of pine nuts, primarily from China, develop a persistent metallic or bitter taste that coats everything they eat for up to 2 weeks afterward.

It's harmless, but the cause isn't fully understood. It seems to be specific to one species, Pinus armandii, that sometimes gets mixed into commercial supplies. There's no way to tell from looking at the nut. Chestnuts, the odd one out on this entire list. Every other nut here is high in fat and relatively low in carbohydrates. Chestnuts are the opposite. Low fat, high carbohydrate, closer nutritionally to a grain than a nut.

For centuries across Europe and Asia, chestnuts were ground into flour and used to make bread. In parts of rural Italy and France, chestnut flour was what kept people alive through winter when wheat crops failed. The American chestnut was once one of the most dominant trees in Eastern North America. It made up roughly a quarter of the entire hardwood forest from Maine to Georgia. The wood was rot resistant and straight grained, ideal for building.

The nuts fed wildlife, livestock, and people. Millions of families depended on them. Then in 1904, a fungal blight arrived from Asia, likely on imported nursery plants. It spread at a rate of roughly 50 miles per year. Within 40 years, an estimated 4 billion American chestnut trees were dead. It's considered one of the greatest ecological disasters in American history. The species isn't technically extinct. The roots survive and send up new shoots, but they always die before they can reproduce.

Scientists have spent decades trying to breed a blight resistant variety. One practical note, if you roast chestnuts without cutting into the shell first, the steam pressure builds up inside and they explode. Score an X into the flat side before roasting. Coconuts, technically not a nut, not even close. It's a drupe, the same botanical category as peaches, cherries, and olives. It's also the largest seed in the plant kingdom.

The coconut palm solved the problem of ocean dispersal better than almost any plant on Earth. A coconut can fall into the ocean, float for months without losing viability, wash up on a beach thousands of miles away, and germinate in the sand. That's how coconut palms colonized essentially every tropical coastline on the planet without any human help. The name comes from Portuguese and Spanish sailors who encountered them in the 1400s.

They saw the three dark spots on the base of the shell, the two eyes and a mouth of the germination pores, and thought it looked like a grinning face. Coco in old Iberian slang meant a grinning skull or a face meant to frighten children. So, the name for one of the most useful plants in human history is essentially a 500-year-old sailor's joke. Every part of the coconut palm has been used by human cultures for thousands of years.

The water, the meat, the oil, the husk fiber for rope, the leaves for roofing, the wood for construction. Some Pacific Island cultures developed over 100 distinct words to describe different stages of coconut ripeness and maturity. It was that central to survival. That's every nut. If you had to rank them by sheer strangeness, Brazil nut takes the top spot. Best nutrition profile, walnut. Wildest origin story, cashew.

Which one surprised you most? And which nut do you think is the most overrated? Drop it in the comments, I read them.