Any of ya’ll know a good way to get the nut out of the shell in one piece?
Buy them in a tin, take the lid off, take off the protective seal. 
Here’s a nice picture of a man holding some Brazil nut fruits.
If you chop the fruit open, it looks like this.
>>>>>>>>>wince<<<<<<<<<<<
Lots of interesting pics there. And the girl with the short hair is cute.
Just in case you are not a fan of House The National Institute of Health says:
Selenium content of foods can vary. For example, Brazil nuts may contain as much as 544 micrograms of selenium per ounce. They also may contain far less selenium. It is wise to eat Brazil nuts only occasionally because of their unusually high intake of selenium.
I stand ready to test the freeze, stand on end and smack with a hammer theory, in order to fight ignorance. I’ll get back when I have the opportunity.
I am gonna go freeze my nuts right now…I’ll report back soon.
The first picture looks like it should be captioned “Why yes these are my nuts, why do you ask?”
They also concentrate radium. Some sources claim that Brazil nuts contain 1000 times the radium level of any other food item. I raise an eyebrow at that statement, but sources roughly agree (within an order of magnitude) about the actual levels:
http://www.orau.org/PTP/collection/consumer%20products/brazilnuts.htm
pCi/g is picocuries/gram
The amount isn’t enough to be dangerous with any reasonable amount of Brazil nuts in one’s diet, particularly as you don’t absorb most of the radium, but it is enough to measure, and claim that Brazil nuts are radioactive.
This article places it in the context of normal amount of long-lived radionuclides ingested per year:
http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/statistics/radioact/radfood.htm
(If you live on a steady diet of shellfish and Brazil nuts, maybe you got a problem.)
For the last three years it’s been impossible to buy Brazil nuts in their shells in the UK. This is because of the perceived risk of carcinogenic agents which could be present in the shells. As the cost of testing each batch of nuts for this agent is considered too high by the importers, we can only buy shelled nuts.
Yes, be careful. If you become over-saleened, you may wake up and find you’ve purchased a loud, growly Mustang.
Froze 'em for about 3 hours.Works great! All but 2 came out in one piece.Hooray! 
Now about all this radium and selenium…I eat quite a few of these things.Am I gonna get super powers? What kind of powers would someone get from a brazil nut? Or should I cut down on eating so many?
You turn into the Hulk with a Portuguese accent …
If the selenium caution is correct, that would be an issue long before the radium. The second link I gave indicates that eating 30-40 Brazil nuts/week might approximately double the amount of radionuclides you ingest from various sources, if you aren’t doing anything else that increases your exposure. That’s a LOT of Brazil nuts, and you probably have to get appreciably more than that to actually be dangerous.
OTOH, if you dine every night on shellfish and Brazil nuts in a basement apartment in Denver constructed from the native stone, serving them on pre-WWII red Fiestaware plates, by the light of a Coleman lantern with old thorium mantles …
Selenium can be a really nasty poison…really nasty in what it does to you. There was an episode of “House” as mentioned by don’t ask and there was also a movie about a man who slowly poisoned his wife with it (I think it was a Lifetime movie…I can almost picture Meridith Baxter Birney playing the part of the wife).
It can be found in electronics…mostly older ones as it’s been phased out over the years. It used to be a main ingredient in photoconductors (drums) for copiers and laser printers because of it’s conductivity in the presence of bright light.
. . . or anywhere in the European Union.
Nanny State! :mad:
I don’t quite get this. If the selenium is in the shells, and we don’t eat the shells, why does it matter who shells them?