Hello! This is the owner of Fusubon. Today, I will tell you more about quinoa.
Native to the Andes region of South America
Quinoa is a plant of the Amaranthaceae family native to the Andes region of Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru.
Quinoa is a grain about 2mm in size. It was first collected from the wild 5,000 to 7,000 years ago and has been cultivated as a grain since the time of the Inca civilization.
In the Inca civilization, it was considered a sacred crop, known as the "mother of grains," and was as valuable as corn.
Quinoa carbohydrate and nutritional content
Although it has been made since the time of the Inca civilization, it is a relatively new food in Japan and is not commonly known, so the 2015 edition (7th revision) of the Standard Tables of Food Composition in Japan does not include a listing of its nutritional content. What should you do in this situation?
In such cases, there is a website called Nutrition Data that provides nutritional data for the US. If you enter the English name of a food ingredient in the search box, you can get the nutritional data, so please feel free to use it.
In this case, we are going to use quinoa, so in English it will be called Quinoa. Let’s enter Quinoa in the “enter food name” window. For now, you can leave the category field as All Categories.
You will then be presented with the options of Cooked and Uncooked, but since I want to know the nutritional content of raw quinoa, I will select Uncooked.
Since I want to see the nutritional content per 100g, I set Serving size: to 100g. Then the NUTRITION INFORMATION section at the bottom will change to Amounts per 100 grams.
As you can see, the top left is calories, below that are carbohydrates and dietary fiber, below that are lipids, on the top right are protein, and below that are vitamins and minerals.
If you are unsure how to read overseas labels, please refer to our article How to find the carbohydrate content of overseas foods from their nutrition facts tables.
First, the calorie count is 368 kcal. Next, the carbohydrate content is 64.2 g, and the dietary fiber content is 7.0 g, so the sugar content is 57.2 g.
We can see that the fat content is 6.1g, and in the upper right corner we can see that the protein content is 14.1g, and the sodium content is 5mg.
Quinoa (raw) Nutritional information per 100g : Carbohydrates 57.2g, Calories 368kcal, Protein 14.1g, Fat 6.1g, Dietary Fiber 7.0g, Sodium 5mg
Quoted from Self Nutrition Data.
Now, quinoa contains about 60g of carbohydrates per 100g , so if we only consider carbohydrates, we realize that it is a food that you should not consume in large amounts.
At Fusubon, we use acai cream cheese with quinoa as a topping to add texture.
Quinoa, which has long been a staple food for the Incas, has also been recognized by NASA as a "staple food of the 21st century" and an ideal source of nutrients for space food, making it a hot topic.
Quinoa has two major characteristics.
High in protein
For a grain, it is relatively rich in protein, containing 14g per 100g, which is about twice as much protein as brown rice, and contains a balanced amount of all nine essential amino acids.
Rich in vitamins and minerals
It is rich in vitamin E and vitamin B2, and in particular contains 10 times the iron and calcium of brown rice .
