Thus, the monounsaturated diet may be as effective as a diet low in fats and high in carbohydrates. Pecan nuts contain about 65 to 70 percent oils. Discovery of a population high in oleic acid would be a major break-through because such germplasm could become a vital part of pecan breeding. This native from Freestone County has been placed in the USDA Germplasm Repository as breeding material. Future breeding procedures could be developed that would lead to higher quality nuts.
Pecans contain oil that compares very favorably with oil from other oil seed crops.
These oils were purchased from a local grocery store and run through a gas chromatograph. The expeller pressed pecan oil came from a retail supplier in California. The low oleic content, compared with our own cold pressed nuts, indicates that the expeller nuts had probably been out of storage so long that they had lost much of their quality through oxidation of the monounsaturated fatty acids to polyunsaturated fatty acids and smaller carbon fragments. If the pecan oil industry is to evolve into a viable industry much more consideration should be given to the quality of the oil stock. Only olive and canola oils compare favorably with high quality cold pressed pecans.