whatilearned
Read more: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/can-you-eat-acorns#generally-safe
TIL: Acorns are actually safe to eat but can be Dangerous in large amounts because they contain Tannins which is an anti nuitrient.
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Dangerous in large amounts *raw.*
>While raw acorns harbor high amounts of potentially harmful plant compounds called tannins, properly cooked acorns are low in tannins and generally safe to eat.
Native Americans made bread from acorn flour.
It’s also used for tanning leather (tannin, not acorns necessarily).
In order to safely eat them the acorns must be soaked in water that is regularly changed. When the water no longer turns brown, they can be dried and ground into flour.
And acorn’s tannin content varies a lot depending on species. In general, acorns from the white oak family are lower in tannin than those from the red oak family.
Take a nibble from an acorn sometime, they’re not bad at all and make an excellent flour too.
Aren’t a crazy high number of edible things not great to eat in high quantities?
Tannin is also in tea.
In regions where acorns are abundant the public awareness of their edibility is closely and inversely related to time elapsed from the last famine.
In layman’s terms, you tend to know about it if your gramps told you how they had nothing to eat and had to go to the forest and gather acorns and beechnut and wild spinach and nettle to make soup.
Bitterness serves as a useful tool for not eating too much!
American Indigenous and most early civilizations ate acorns by soaking them in water to lessen the bitter tannins, the same ones we use to tan leather and age wine & whisky. It was a major but unreliable food source with some years having a mast crop to overwhelm animals eating all their nuts and other years starving them out. Which is why civilizations switched from oak trees to domesticating grains with less bitter tannins and more fatty lipids. This nutritional shortcoming is one of many reasons why the Americas were so easily colonized by better feed newcomers.
Oak trees have resisted domestication because of their long breeding cycle, requirements for a mature soil (microorganism complexity) and genetic complexity (not true to seed).
Maybe GMO will finally allow the creation of the oak trees our ancestors were trying to breed in order to feed.
anti nutrient is not good medical term. The best way of eating them is to powder them in a grinder, and soak out the tannins and then eat them. Course with water the bacteria get going, so it’s hard to avoid contamination.
Best thing, if in doubt don’t eat any kind of acorns.
They hold toxins, AKA poisons. NOT anti-nutrients, whatever that means. Or is it just click bait?
The best way to eat acorns is to feed them to pigs and then eat the delicious pork and bacon they produce.