A new meta-analysis confirms nuts’ disease-fighting power and adds more diseases to the list of conditions they fight.

April 18, 2017

1 Min Read
Go nuts, live longer?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know that nuts are good for us, that they could help us live longer. A 2013 study found that people who ate a daily handful of nuts were 20 percent less likely to die from any cause over a 30-year period. Now, new research not only confirms this, it’s adding other diseases to list of bodily blights that nuts fight.

The large analysis of current research, published in the journal BMC Medicine, suggests that people who eat at least 20 grams of nuts daily have a lower risk of heart disease, cancer and other diseases. Researchers from the School of Public Health at Imperial College London found that the nuts cut the risk of coronary heart disease by nearly 30 percent, risk of cancer by 15 percent and the risk of premature death by 22 percent.

"In nutritional studies, so far much of the research has been on the big killers such as heart diseases, stroke and cancer, but now we're starting to see data for other diseases,” the study’s co-author Dagfinn Aune from the School of Public Health at Imperial said in a college release published on sciencedaily.com. "We found a consistent reduction in risk across many different diseases, which is a strong indication that there is a real underlying relationship between nut consumption and different health outcomes. It's quite a substantial effect for such a small amount of food."

So, should you cover your bases and snarf a bunch of nuts throughout the day? Nope. The study found that eating more than 20 grams of nuts a day didn’t boost participants' health outcomes.

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