Nutritional Pearls: How Do Nuts Affect Heart Disease Risk?
Thomas is a 45-year-old man who is concerned about his risk of developing heart disease. He is slightly overweight, and reports that while he does exercise, he has found it difficult to give up salty snacks between meals. He particularly loves potato chips, but will “eat anything with some salt on it.”
He asks you if there are any tricks he can try to help him give up his beloved salty snacks.
How do you advise your patient?
What is the correct answer?
(Answer and discussion on next page)
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Answer: Consuming nuts, even dry roasted and salted nuts, could reduce your risk of dying from heart disease.
Over the years I have written on nearly a dozen peer-reviewed studies that focus on nuts and their impact on all sorts of conditions, including poor cholesterol scores,1 cancer,2 and type 2 diabetes.3 This doesn't include those articles written about a Mediterranean-style diet, which includes nuts as one of its nine dietary components.
The Research
Recently, an international team of scientists, including representatives from Italy, Poland, and the United States, pooled the data from multiple prospective studies to look at the effects of nut consumption on the risk of death from all causes or specifically cancer or heart disease.4
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Note: Prospective studies are considered far more meaningful than cross-sectional studies, as prospective studies follow participants from one point in time to another, while cross-sectional studies look at a single snapshot in time.
The authors found 7 prospective studies that looked at all-cause mortality, 6 that looked at risk of death from heart disease, and 2 that looked at risk of death from cancer. In pooling the data from these studies, the effective total number of participants was over 350,000 people.
The Results
After analysis, they found that consuming a single serving of nuts per week reduced participants' risk of dying from heart disease by 7% and from all causes by 4%. A serving of nuts per day further reduced their risk of dying from heart disease by 49% and from all causes by 27%. Cancer risk decreased by 14% only when the researchers compared those who ate the most nuts (one or more servings per day) with those who ate the least (less than 1 serving per week or none at all).
There are two caveats here: first, this research shows an association between eating nuts and a lower risk of death from certain causes—it does not prove that eating more nuts is the cause of that reduction in risk. Further, the authors note that those participants who ate more nuts also tended to eat more fruits and vegetables, have a lower body mass index, and were less likely to smoke than those who ate fewer nuts.
This is simply another reason for us to choose nuts—whatever your favorite kind is—as a snack, as a topping for cereals, or added to recipes for texture and flavor. I tell my patients that while raw, unsalted nuts would be my first choice, dry roasted and salted are fine if you don't have to worry about your sodium intake and you just don't like raw nuts. Candied nuts are best avoided as snacks.
References:
- http://www.drgourmet.com/bites/2006/0802.shtml
- http://www.drgourmet.com/bites/2006/1129.shtml
- http://www.drgourmet.com/bites/2013/042413.shtml
- Grosso G, Yang J, Marventano S, et al. Nut consumption on all-cause, cardiovascular, and cancer mortality risk: a systematic review and meta-analysis of epidemiologic studies. Am J Clin Nutr 2015;101:783-93