You know you love your nuts.
Eat and be healthy:
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Eat and be healthy:
The Nut Case
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After years of being frowned upon by fat-phobic nutritionists—and being relegated to the "Use Sparingly" ghetto at the top of the government's food pyramid—nuts are starting to look like nutritional heroes. Not a day goes by, it seems, without the release of another study confirming the health benefits of nuts, from reducing the risk of heart disease and cancer to a possible role in the prevention of Alzheimer's disease.
Evidence is most convincing in the area of heart health. Most recently, data from the ongoing Physicians' Health Study, which followed over 21,000 male physicians for more than 17 years, showed that those doctors who reported eating an ounce of nuts two or more times a week had a 47 percent lower risk of sudden heart-disease death, and a 30 percent lower risk of coronary heart-disease death, than non-nut-eaters. This follows on the heels of other large-scale trials, such as the Nurses' Health Study (86,000 women) and the Adventist Health Study (31,000 Seventh-Day Adventists), which found heart-attack risk reductions of nearly one-third and one-half, respectively, when frequent nut-eaters and non-nut-eaters were compared.
Ironically, it may be the fat content of nuts that accounts for their seeming health benefits; nuts are undeniably rich in fat, chiefly monounsaturated fat, which is increasingly recognized as having cholesterol-lowering properties. But that's not the whole story: according to a recent review, when nuts are added to experimental diets, subjects' cholesterol levels tend to drop more than would have been predicted by the dietary-fat manipulations alone, suggesting that other substances in nuts have heart-healthy effects. Most nuts are rich in fiber, vitamin E, magnesium and folic acid—all known to help reduce the risk of heart disease (and, in some cases, cancer). There's also evidence that substances found in nuts, such as plant sterols and arginine, an amino acid, may account for some of the cardiovascular benefits.
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