Nutrition Hotline
By Reed Mangels, PhD, RD
QUESTION: Are flaxseeds and other seeds good to eat? How much should I be eating? My doctor told me to eat more seeds so I've cut down on beans and have been eating seeds instead.
R.D., MD
ANSWER: Seeds are a good choice with a few caveats. As the chart below shows, they have less protein and much more fat than you'd get from a serving of beans providing a similar amount of calories. Seeds, for the most part, are somewhat lower in iron and higher or similar in zinc compared to beans on an amount per calorie basis. The practical implication of all of this is, that if you replaced beans with seeds, you'd end up eating more calories and fat to get the same amount of protein. On the other hand, including some seeds will give you a boost of zinc, copper, magnesium, and other essential minerals.
Vegan food guides often combine seeds in the same group with nuts and recommend 1 or 2 servings of nuts and/or seeds daily with a serving being 2 Tablespoons of seeds.
A health care provider may have recommended eating seeds as sources of alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), an omega-3 fatty acid that can be in short supply in a vegan diet. Not all seeds provide much of this essential fat. Some seeds, namely chia and flax, do contain significant amounts of ALA. It doesn't take much to meet ALA requirements, however. The recommendation for ALA for adult men is 1.6 grams per day and for adult women 1.1 grams per day. These amounts would be supplied by about 2 1/4 teaspoons (men) or 1 1/2 (women) of chia seeds daily. For flaxseeds, 1 Tablespoon per day (men) or 2 teaspoons (women) daily would provide approximately the recommended amount of ALA.
Remember, whole flaxseeds are not well-digested; so to get the benefits of flaxseeds, use the ground form. Similarly, to get the benefits of ALA from chia seeds, it's best to eat them in ground form.
| Food | calories | protein (g) | fat (g) | iron (mg) | zinc (mg) | ALA (g) |
| 1/4 cup chia seeds | 220 | 7.5 | 13.9 | 3.5 | 2.1 | 8.1 |
| 1/4 cup ground flax seeds | 150 | 5.1 | 11.8 | 2.3 | 1.6 | 6.4 |
| 1/4 cup pumpkin seeds | 169 | 8.8 | 14.5 | 2.4 | 2.2 | 0.033 |
| 1/4 cup sesame seeds | 206 | 6.4 | 17.9 | 5.2 | 2.8 | 0.135 |
| 1/4 cup sunflower seeds | 207 | 5.8 | 19.0 | 2.3 | 1.8 | 0.026 |
| 1/4 cup cooked lentils | 172 | 13.4 | 0.6 | 5.0 | 1.9 | 0.055 |
