A Favorite: Pumpkin Seeds

"Superfoods" are all over the place these days, making you feel like you should develop superpowers if you eat these foods. Today's post is dedicated to one food that I recently started eating, and think it's pretty super: pumpkin seeds.

As with most any food it's best to buy raw pumpkin seeds.

Benefits
Pumpkin seeds have many great nutrients in them proven to improve heart health, immune support, heart and liver health, prostate health, and anti-inflammatory benefits. Here are just a few of the nutrients in raw pumpkin seeds:

• Manganese
• Phosphorous
• Copper 
• Magnesium
• Zinc
• Protein
• Iron
• Fiber
• Omega-3s
• Antioxidants

One serving is usually 1/4 cup, and you probably want to stick to one serving a day. Although they have tremendous health benefits and are nutrient dense, they are also high in fat and calories. The brand I have has 15g of fat and 2.5 grams of saturated fat per serving. They do have a lot of polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats as well.

Adding them to your diet
You can eat pumpkin seeds plain by the handful or toast them with a little salt or lime juice and chili powder. I love adding them to smoothies, salads, cereal, trail mix and stir fry.

Because of their higher iron content, I love getting my kids to eat pumpkin seeds, but I do have to hide them sometimes. For my daughter, I add them the granola she eats on top of yogurt. For my son, who is 18 months old, I grind the pumpkin seeds to a powder using a coffee grinder and add the powder to applesauce, smoothies or mashed foods such as sweet potatoes. It doesn't give him a ton of pumpkin seeds, but at least he's getting some of the benefit. We eat no red meat, so adding foods like pumpkin seeds are pretty important to our diet.

What's your favorite way to eat pumpkin seeds?