● Food Intelligence · Nuts & Seeds
Across 21,611 pecan logs, members averaged +27.1 mg/dL — but plain pecans barely move glucose at all. Cohort meals split sharply: light-carb builds (0–40g) hold to +23.8 mg/dL while a very-heavy-carb plate (110g+) climbs to +43.7 mg/dL, an 84% escalation driven almost entirely by the cake, brownie, or sticky bun the pecans are folded into.
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Barely — pecans alone averaged just +24.5 mg/dL across 3,169 single-item logs, with 52% of responses in the low-spike range. The full cohort sits at +27.1 mg/dL because of dessert and salad context. Across 21,611 logged meals containing pecans, the average glucose peak was +27.1 mg/dL (median +23 mg/dL). When pecans were eaten alone, that number dropped to +24.5 mg/dL — among the lowest single-item averages in the atlas. The dominant lever isn't the nut; it's what the pecan is folded into. Pecans in a cake or brownie pushed the average peak to +35.4 mg/dL (+9 mg/dL above the alone baseline), and pecans on a salad ran +32.3 mg/dL (+6 mg/dL). Pecans on oatmeal or yogurt added almost nothing (+1 mg/dL), and pecans in a granola or trail mix were a wash. Plain pecans are nearly inert — observational, not yet causal.
Some members spike +23.8 mg/dL. Others spike +43.7. The only way to know how you'll spike is to measure with a Signos CGM.
Pecans are a near-zero-carb, fat-dominant food — a 1-oz serving (~19 halves) contains about 4g of carbs, half of which is fiber. Their published glycemic index of 10 puts them among the lowest-GI whole foods on record, and the cohort confirms it: plain pecans averaged just +24.5 mg/dL across 3,169 single-item logs, with a median of +20 mg/dL. The full cohort sits at +27.1 mg/dL because most pecan logs are pecans-on-something — a cake, a salad, a sundae. The single biggest lever in the data is total meal carb load: meals with ≥60g carbs ran 70% higher than the low-carb baseline (p<0.001), and the carb-bucket analysis shows a near-linear escalation from +23.8 mg/dL in light (0–40g) meals to +43.7 mg/dL in very-heavy (110g+) meals — an 84% jump. Two secondary levers pull in the opposite direction: pecans' own fat content (~20g per oz) and high fiber (~3g per oz) help blunt co-ingested carbs, with high-fat pairings reducing the response by ~9% and high-fiber meals by ~4%. The mechanism is observational, not yet causal, but the pattern is consistent with fat slowing gastric emptying and fiber dampening the glycemic excursion.
This page draws on 21,611 pecan-containing meal logs from 5,261 unique Signos members, plus a 3,169-log single-item sub-cohort where pecans were logged alone with no pairings, collected through the Signos production CGM platform. Data were filtered to postprandial glucose responses (PPGR) between 0 and 100 mg/dL to exclude sensor artifacts and implausible readings. Modifier effects were estimated using Welch's t-test on matched pairs against a defined baseline; all reported effects carry p<0.001 unless noted. We report mean glucose peak across a right-skewed distribution — the median single-item spike of +20 mg/dL is a few mg/dL lower than the mean of +24.5 mg/dL, which is typical for this type of data. Pecans were identified in member logs using a regex matching "pecan" or "pecans" as a primary ingredient, with explicit excludes for compound branded items where pecan is featured but not the food being analyzed (pecan pie, pralines, pecan sandies, turtle candies). Any carb-pair slot requires at least 30 matched meals before it appears in the recipe builder, and the spiced / cinnamon-sugar form (n=2) was suppressed for failing the threshold.