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Nuts as a Dietary Enrichment with Selected Minerals-Content Assessment Supported by Chemometric Analysis

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Summary

Atomic absorption spectrometry (AAS) analysis of magnesium, calcium, potassium, selenium, and zinc in 10 types of commercially available nuts (n = 120 samples; 12 replicates per type) purchased from Polish retail markets. The study reports per-type medians and ranges and evaluates nuts as dietary sources of these minerals against reference values. All 10 nut types qualify as magnesium sources under EU labeling criteria.

Key numbers

Magnesium content in mg/kg (median; range from Table 1, p. 5):

Nut typeMedian Mg (mg/kg)Range
Brazil nuts10,5098,221 to 20,474
Cashews7,2813,699 to 9,394
Pine nuts5,3462,448 to 8,050
Almonds5,3594,196 to 7,647
Peanuts4,0492,612 to 6,282
Hazelnuts2,5712,106 to 6,358
Walnuts2,7721,115 to 5,375
Pecans1,99377 to 5,973
Macadamia2,044660 to 3,882
Pistachios1,463214 to 2,884
  • Brazil nuts had the highest magnesium content overall; pistachios had the lowest (p. 4)
  • LOD/LOQ for Mg reported in abstract as determined by standard AAS method with palladium/magnesium nitrate matrix modifier for selenium; Mg LOD = “of Ca, Mg” listed in p. 3 methods as standard reference materials (exact LOD not extracted)
  • All 10 tested nut types qualify as dietary magnesium sources in this study population

Evidence Fitness

Reconstructable dataset. n = 120 (12 per nut type); single-country retail market (Poland, 2022). The wide intratype range (e.g. pecans 77 to 5,973 mg/kg) reflects genuine variability across cultivars and origin. Data cannot be treated as globally representative but establish plausible concentration ranges for temperate-market nut supplies.

Methods (brief)

Atomic absorption spectrometry (AAS). Samples purchased from Polish retail. Twelve replicates per nut type. Matrix modifier (palladium + magnesium nitrate hexahydrate) used for selenium only; standard flame AAS for Mg. Potassium by flame atomic emission spectrometry. Statistical comparisons by Tukey test; chemometric classification by principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA).

Implications

  • Courses: illustrates that nuts as a category span nearly a 10-fold range in magnesium content, with Brazil nuts at the high end and pistachios at the low end; useful for dietary adequacy examples.
  • App: no contamination_profile implication; magnesium is a nutritional analyte here, not a hazard analyte.
  • Microbiome: no direct connection.

Provenance notes

Open access (cc-by). Retrieved from PMC Open Access (pmc-oa-opendata S3). SHA256 verified against MANIFEST.csv.

Update history

No substantive edit history is available in this build. The full commit record is available in git.

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