You’re not nuts, they’re good for your heart

Though the tide seems to be turning in recent years, for some time nuts were avoided by those trying to lose weight. It’s true nuts are high in fat, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t good for your health or that you’ll put on weight if you eat them.

Studies have found correlations between those who have low BMIs and those who eat lots of nuts, but more large-scale research is now also finding links between nut consumption and lower rates of cardiovascular disease.

One particularly recent study, published at the beginning of March, looked at a pool of over 200,000 people (from three surveys) from the southeast United States and Shanghai. They found that in all three survey groups – which spanned multiple different ethnicities and socioeconomic statuses, a caveat to previous research – nut consumption was correlated with lower rates of mortality. The results were even more clear in deaths related to cardiovascular disease.

The paper was published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

“Nuts are rich in nutrients, such as unsaturated fatty acids, fiber, vitamins, phenolic antioxidants, arginine and other phytochemicals. All of them are known to be beneficial to cardiovascular health, probably through their anti-oxidative, anti-inflammatory and endothelial function maintenance properties,” said Xiao-Ou Shu, senior author on the study.

Because the paper was a review of previous surveys the authors note it can’t prove definitively that the two are linked, but it does reinforce previous findings.