Nuts for life

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!

 

By Dr David Hassan

The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine: Association of Nut Consumption with Total and Cause-Specific Mortality, Ying Bao.