I believe that we are fully justified in the conclusion that nuts and nut products, if rationally used in our diets, are as digestible and fully as valuable from a nutritional point of view as our other foodstuffs. While we can now definitely speak of the high digestibility of nuts, it is necessary to consider other phases of the part played by foods in nutrition. The fact that a food after being taken into the body can be broken up by the digestive juices of the alimentary tract, and the products absorbed, as we have found, to be the case with the nuts, is not the end of the story of the function of that food. About fifteen years ago, it was discovered that during the progress of digestion, the protein materials are reduced by the digestive juices of our stomachs and intestines to smaller chemical compounds, and that it is these smaller fragments of the protein molecule that are absorbed into the blood and are used to build up our muscles and tissues. These fragments or "building stones" as they have been fancifully called, are all of a distant class of chemical compounds known to chemists as amino acids. Eighteen of these acids have been found as the products of protein digestion. We may conceive of our bodies as being continually supplied with a mass of these 18 building stones from which it selects the kind and number that it needs to repair the everyday wear and tear of the tissues and in the case of the growing child builds new structures. Since the date of this important discovery regarding the fate of indigested protein, it has been found that with few exceptions, the body is not able to manufacture these amino acids or to change one kind into another, and must depend on the protein eaten, for a supply of the various kinds that go to make up the body protein. Further it has been found, that many of our commonly used food proteins do not contain all 18 of these amino acids components. In some foods one, two, and sometimes more are lacking, or if present are in very small amounts. If our diet contained only proteins of an inferior grade, we can picture our body requiring building stones of various kinds to maintain the structure of the body and unable to obtain them due to the poor quality of the food, protein. Nutritional failure would be the result. The proteins then must be of the right quality as well as present in the proper quantities, to prevent mal-nutrition. Bearing in mind these facts, it is necessary in studying a food such as our nuts, to determine the kind of protein the individual nut contains as well as to know whether or not it can be digested by the body.