Chocolate with nuts is perceived by many of us as the more “healthy” choice on the candy shelf. But does this rule also apply when moving from the solid bar to the spread in the jar? Let’s sort it out.
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Chocolate with nuts
Adding nuts to a chocolate bar improves its nutritional profile and turns it from “just a candy” into something much more balanced:
Reduction of the glycemic index: Nuts are rich in healthy fats, protein, and fiber. When eaten together with the sugar in chocolate, they slightly slow the rate at which sugar is absorbed into the blood. This prevents the “sugar spike” and the crash that follows, contributing to a longer-lasting feeling of fullness.
Addition of vitamins and minerals: Regular milk chocolate doesn’t offer much added value. Nuts add magnesium (which is good for muscles), vitamin E (an antioxidant), and omega 3 (especially in walnuts), which is important for heart and brain health.
The chewing mechanism: Nuts require us to chew. Chewing slows the pace of eating, allowing the satiety mechanism to activate before we’ve “finished off” an entire bar.
The winning choice: Dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids and above) with nuts. Less sugar, more antioxidants.
The deception in hazelnut chocolate spreads
In popular spreads (like Nutella and similar products), the nuts are mainly present in the product name and advertisements, and less so in the nutritional value. Chocolate spread is still a really unhealthy product even if it contains nuts, and it’s important to remember this before putting chocolate in your children’s sandwich.
When you look at the ingredient list, the picture isn’t great:
Sugar is king: In most spreads, sugar is the first and main ingredient (often over 50% of the product!).
Refined palm oil: Beyond the fact that this is a cheap saturated fat, the real problem with the palm oil in spreads lies in its digestion process.
To turn crude oil into a neutral one, it is refined at particularly high temperatures of over 200 degrees. This process creates harmful by-products, which the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has already flagged as suspected carcinogens and as toxic to the kidneys.
When this is the second ingredient in the ingredient list of a spread your children eat every day, the nuts decorating the packaging are really the last of our problems
The nuts are in an insignificant amount to upgrade the product: Hazelnuts usually appear only in third place (about 13% only). This is not enough to balance the mountains of sugar and processed oil.
Here are the facts
- In a popular chocolate spread (Nutella and similar), the standard for leading hazelnut chocolate spreads worldwide stands at 13% hazelnuts. This is the official figure that appears on the packaging of the biggest brands.
- In a chocolate bar with nuts—the numbers here usually range between 25% and 32% nuts.
- In high-quality chocolate bars (such as those with large squares or dark chocolate with whole nuts), the nut content is around 30%. Some brands even reach 33% nuts in “premium” bars.
- The result: 2.5 times more of the “healthy” component (the nuts) than in a spread, where most of the volume comes from sugar and palm oil.
The “quantity trap” – how many calories are in a sandwich?
Here, in my view, this is another significant issue that often goes unnoticed: One teaspoon of spread contains about 70 calories. But let’s be honest—one teaspoon is almost never enough for a slice, and certainly not for a pita (where we easily reach 3–4 teaspoons).
The math is simple: Just the spread inside the pita can reach 280 calories, even before the pita itself! This is an enormous sugar load that will make you hungry again within an hour.
So what do we do?
If you’re looking for a truly “healthy” spread in which the benefits of nuts are actually expressed, it’s worth adopting the following alternatives:
“Reverse” spread: Look for spreads in which nuts are the first ingredient (over 40–50% nuts) and sugar appears at the end of the list, if at all.
High-quality homemade spread: Natural nut/almond butter + cocoa: The perfect solution. Mix 100% natural hazelnut or almond butter with a bit of quality cocoa and lightly sweeten with date syrup or honey.
Natural alternatives: Tiger nut spread (a sweet, fiber-rich tuber) and cocoa—no sugar, natural, a rosemary-chocolate-like flavor, and a wonderful, less processed variation.