Yeah, this is probably way too in the weeds, but I can’t seem to find a good answer – googling gives some numbers for calories per oz, or per tbsp, or per cup, and then some different numbers on seeds per cup or whatnot, but they aren’t consistent, and it doesn’t say whether it’s shelled or unshelled for the volume and weight measurements.
Any ideas? I would think this would be easy to figure out, but I’m failing so far…
I happen to have two brands of salted roasted dehulled sunflower seeds with nutrient labels and an inexpensive electronic scale with claimed precision of 10 milligrams. I weighed 20 seeds of each brand, excluding obviously broken ones.
Brand 1) 1.24 grams per 20 seeds, 180 kcal per 30 gram serving, hence 0.37 kcal per seed
Brand 2) 0.89 grams per 20 seeds, 190 kcal per 30 gram serving, hence 0.28 kcal per seed
I also have bulk dehulled raw (not roasted, not salted) sunflower seeds, but no nutrient information for them. They weigh 1.45 grams per 20 seeds.
Calorie counting – I recently started snacking on sunflower seeds (since it takes a long time to eat them and therefore it’s hard to eat too much). I usually eat about 20-30 seeds a few times per day, and I couldn’t find an estimate as to how many calories this would be.
Sunflower seeds have nothing on Pumpkin seeds in terms of sodium, so thats at least a better choice, any of the spicier flavors of sunflower seeds always have more sodium.
The whole bag only has about 20% of a day’s sodium, and it takes me at least a week to eat a whole bag, so I’m not too worried about sodium from the sunflower seeds.