The old adage, “you are what you eat,” may not hold true for those who eat nuts, as a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine has found that regularly eating walnuts or cashews can reduce a person’s risk of dying from cancer, heart disease along with other causes.
“There’s a general perception when you eat more nuts you’ll get fat. Our results show the alternative,” study author Dr. Ying Bao of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston told the Associated Press.
Within the study, researchers followed nearly 120,000 Americans all 50 states who had enrolled in either the Nurses’ Health Study or the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. The study team learned that people who ate a regular, one-ounce serving of almonds, cashews or any other tree nuts were built with a 20 % lower mortality rate within the three-decade length of the research, in contrast to those who did not eat nuts every day.
More specifically, nut-eating participants’ risk of dying from cardiovascular disease was 29 percent lower and their risk of dying of cancer was 11 percent lower than people who didn’t eat nuts regularly.
The study team said they did not know why nuts seemed to convey health benefits. They speculated that unsaturated fatty acids, minerals along with other healthy nutrients reduce cholesterol, inflammation and other health problems.
Ralph Sacco, an old president from the American Heart Association, told the AP that nuts really are a healthy snack that could be replacing something a smaller amount healthy inside a person’s diet.
“Sometimes when you eat nuts you eat a smaller amount of something else like potato chips,” he speculated.
The researchers noted that study participants who often ate nuts were rather healthier, often weighed less, exercised many were not as likely to smoke. Even after considering these and other lifestyle factors, researchers were still able to find a strong take advantage of regular nut consumption.
“I’m very confident,” Bao said about the study’s results. “We accomplished it many analyses, very sophisticated ones” to get rid of confounding factors.
The study team did perform separate analyses on smokers and non-smokers, intense and lightweight exercisers, and those with and without diabetes, yet still saw a regular benefit from eating nuts daily.
Penny Kris-Etherton, a Pennsylvania State University nutrition expert, reviewed previous studies on nuts at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting in Dallas this week.
“We’re seeing advantages of nut consumption on cardiovascular disease in addition to bodyweight and diabetes,” Kris-Etherton told the AP.?“We don’t know exactly what it really is” about nuts that conveys an advantage, she added. “I tell individuals to eat mixed nuts.”
Coming from a reputable Harvard study group, the new study develops another study published captured that found a Mediterranean-style diet, filled with nuts, lowers the chances of heart-related problems, particularly strokes, in older individual having a higher-level of risk.
While the newer study didn’t concentrate on how the nuts were prepared, the AHA recommends four areas of unsalted, oil-free nuts each week. Additionally, it warns against eating a lot of nuts because of their relatively high calorie count.