With the arrival of spring, the good weather and the heat, in many parts of Spain (especially in the south) it is quite typical for them to take snails and capers to eat. We will not judge you if eating a slug seems unappetizing to you, but the truth is that it provides health benefits that we will discuss below.
Logically, it will be more or less suitable for maintaining a balanced diet depending on how we cook them. It will help us little to eat them with sauces and crumbling bread as if there were no tomorrow.
They are ideal in weight loss diets
Eating snails can help us control our weight, whether we want to maintain it or lose it. It has a fairly low calorie intake, just 90 calories per 100 grams. In addition, for every 100 grams it will provide us with 16 grams of protein and only 2 grams of carbohydrates.
As for the fats provided by a 100 g portion of snails, we will be facing 119 mg of eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), a fairly healthy value. Eicosapentaenoic acid is a omega-3 fatty acid, that if we have an average daily intake of 250 mg it can reduce the risk of heart disease. Also, snails have less than 1 gram of saturated fat and less than 2 grams of total fat.
Good contribution of iron and other minerals
Iron in our body is important to produce red blood cells that carry oxygen throughout our body. The snails contribute 3mg of iron (almost 20% of the daily contribution). As you could already discover, there are different types of iron, being present in snails in the form of heme, which is easier to absorb by your body than food.
We also meet with the presence of vitamin B-12, magnesium, potassium and sodium. For every 100 grams, we will obtain 382 mg of potassium and 70 mg of sodium, totally acceptable values in healthy diets. Having a low potassium or high sodium level can lead to kidney, heart or cerebrovascular diseases.
In addition, they are also a perfect food if we want to control our cholesterol.