As a health sceptic, I’m usually pretty critical of ‘superfoods’ like blueberries and chia seeds, but one study about nuts recently turned my head and changed my day to day dietary practice.
The well-designed study looking at over 100,000 people over a 25 year period, showed that even just eating one handful of nuts every week was enough to significantly impact on your chances of dying.
The study showed that even when allowing for other factors such as smoking, obesity, smoking and levels of exercise, the population group that had one handful of nuts a week had over a 10% less chance of dying over that period of time. Those chances reduced even further the more nuts that were eaten – one handful per day? Well, that lead to a 20% less chance of dying.
Those results seemed better than a lot of medicines that I prescribe for people! That was enough for me to change my diet. Now when I’m hungry and need a snack on the way home in the car before tea time, I grab a handful of nuts, preferably walnuts. Walnuts did perform better in the study, but any nut will do, so long as it is raw and unsalted.
Actually, I might go and plant a walnut tree in my garden now!
The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine: Association of Nut Consumption with Total and Cause-Specific Mortality, Ying Bao.
A H (Bill) - 9 years ago
I have been buying raw macadamia nuts from our local super market. All has been going well, until last week when I could only find roasted with salt added, the lady who stocks the nut boxes happened to be filling up some of the boxes and I asked her where I could find raw macadamia nuts, her answer was “We are only stocking roasted from now on”.So I asked her” do you know why people buy macadamia nuts” reply because the are high in omega three fatty acid” Me, “Great , right answer, now do you know what happens to omega three fatty acid when it’s heated? reply “no”. Me “well when exposed to heat, light oxygen or pressure omega three forms trans fats and free radicals that are extremely dangerous to the health of people eating it”. I have since found that I can buy all the raw macadamia nuts that I want on the net direct from a grower, cheaper that what I had been paying in our supermarket. On reflection I believe the reason for not stocking the raw nuts is that they have a longer shelf life when roasted. I always keep my raw ones in a lidded tin in my refrigerator.