Are Nuts a Good Backpacking Food? (No. Here’s What to Eat Instead)

Unless you want to lug around a heavy pack, it’s important to choose backpacking foods which have a lots of calories per ounce. With approximately 160-190 calories per ounce, nuts are definitely calorie dense (by comparison, dried applies only have 60 calories per ounce).

This makes it seem like nuts are the perfect backpacking food. However, because of the way the body processes nuts, they aren’t nearly as calorie-dense as they appear.

Key Point

Nut Butters for the Win!

The Body Doesn’t Absorb All Calories from Nuts

The amount of calories a food has is calculated by bomb calorimeter. Basically, a food is put into a chamber where it is surrounded by water. The food is then ignited and the calorimeter measures how much the temperature of the water increases.

The issue with these calories counts is that our bodies don’t burn up food! The last I checked, I didn’t have a literal furnace inside my stomach!

If you’ve ever pooped in the woods after eating a lot of trail mix, then you are aware that many of those nuts are not getting absorbed by your body (and that you surprisingly don’t chew your food as much as you thought 😉 ).

Actual Calories in Nuts

A lot of research has been done on the actual calorie count of nuts. For example, the studies reported on here, here, and here) have found that almonds and walnuts contain around 20-32% fewer calories than the label indicates.

This still makes nuts a decent food for backpacking in terms of calories. However, if you are calculating your calorie needs for backpacking, the tally can end up being inaccurate.

Also read: How many calories do you need backpacking?

Nut Butters Are Better for Backpacking

Studies have found that chewing nuts – I mean really chewing them – results in more calories and fat being absorbed by the body. Likewise, studies have found that virtually all of the calories from nut butters are absorbed.

Basically, the more ground-up the nuts are (peanut butter vs. peanuts) and how much you pre-chew nuts drastically affects how well your body can absorb the food.

The bottom line? To get maximum calories from your nuts/seeds on the trail:

Chew them thoroughly!
Or bring nut butters instead of whole nuts

Use Nut Butters in Backpacking Meals

Experienced backpackers will bring peanut butter on the trail (here’s how to pack PNB for backpacking). You can eat it directly from the container as a snack. Or, you can add nut butter to meals like:

Oatmeal
Tortillas
Ramen

Ramen with peanut butter, soy sauce paste, and dried scallions (before mixing)

Use Nut Butters in Sauces

I make badass sauces out of blended nuts, and then dehydrate them. The cashew-tomato sauce shown below, for example, has 163 calories per ounce! It’s healthy, lightweight, and very calorie-dense. You can get the recipe (and many more healthy backpacking recipes) in my eBook. Get my book here.