So... are the benefits of nuts offset by the salt on them? Does the red color of beets bring health benefits to strawberry ice cream? Do wasp eggs in Brussels Sprouts contribute to the nutritional profile? And that pumpkin pie... can it be butternut squash or sweet potatoes? Oh dear.
And all along, I thought Thanksgiving was the easiest holiday.
Now if only similar positive effects can be found in beer, I might live forever.
Yes I’ve seen the info before. Almonds are king. Walnuts follow with their omega content. Portion size is important. A small handful total is ideal. Eat too many fats even from healthy sources and they become bad. Brazil but once a month a few. Unsalted is best generally. Raw is best. You can sit down for a tv show with a pound of nuts and gorge. Bottom line people who eat nuts daily have a lower mortality rate. People who take vitamin E supplements have a higher mortality rate.
Correction typo - I meant that while nuts are great in measured small amounts YOU CAN NOT SIT DOWN WITH A POUND OF NUTS AND GORGE. That would be terribly unhealthy.
Cannot stand the taste of nuts. The fatty texture and worse, they taste very slightly of dirt. Invariably they are covered in salt when offered or added to something as a topper.
I love virtually all vegetables. A big salad once a day. I will continue with those. Nuts? Yuck.
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From the disclosures on the article:
"Dr. Malik has received research support from the Peanut Institute. Drs. Li and Hu have received research support from the California Walnut Commission"
Enough said.
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No, not nearly enough said. Many studies have shown that eating nuts, particularly walnuts and almonds, contribute to coronary health. Eat nuts and throw in generous consumption of extra virgin olive oil.
But peanuts are legumes!
These doctors need to specify TREE NUTS? or PEANUTS?
Hey, isn't that a song?
I love nuts and keep big bags in the freezer and eat way too many of them. A handful of nuts is a great way to suppress one's appretite: a high-nutrition-density food with fiber and more fat and protein calories than carbs. BUT: correlation is not causation! Likely the people who choose to eat the most nuts (as opposed to, say, bacon double cheeseburgers and jelly doughnuts) are the most health conscious to begin with. I also eat at least four servings of fatty fish a week. No heart attacks--yet. Is that because of the nuts or the fish?
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The study, in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, is surprisingly biased, because the famous ACC Cardiologists continue to overlooked CAD Inherited Real Risk, conditio sine qua non of CAD and Myocardial Infarction. Despite a flurry of my mail on this important topic, sent to ACC, they continue to be silent on the bedside diagnosis from birth and on removing such a predisposition obtained with non-expensive medical therapy. As usually I am ready to provide NYTimes with any references, Members of ACC know and "appreciate" since ever.
Gee, this all you got? Powerful study in the sense of having a lot of subjects. Weak results in the sense of 12% reduction in heart disease. Another way to interpret this is to say nut eaters had a 1.8% chance of coronary heart disease while the people who didn't nuts had a 2.1% chance of coronary heart disease. One could be excused for dismissing this as a trivial effect. Are you going to change your diet for a 0.3% change in absolute heart disease risk?
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Well, Mike J, that would be true if the risk of CAD was 2.1%, but sadly, its vastly higher than that.
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I eat nuts every day. I like them all. But, what if us nut eaters are always attracted to foods that we hear are healthy and good for us, via the latest headline? Because we try to conform to healthy foods, exercises and habits, we often stumble upon some good ones - and more importantly, avoid obviously unhealthy ones. When the new study completely reverses the previous "Science"
we re-evaluate a bit.
Try to do the Good, avoid the Bad; Be ready to admit being a herd follower. We're trying to be healthy. This is surely enough to give us a significant advantage in any study that will be forthcoming. Duh.
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these coomments should be prohibited:
1. Michael Pollen sais, “Eat mostly plants...
2. Correlation doesn’t equal causation.
3. I tried this weight loss plan for 2 weeks and...
4. My grandmother ate such and such and lived to be...
enough is enough
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Nuts rock! I'm a cannabis physician in western Colorado. I've been telling my patients for years
we wouldn't be here if nature hadn't provided everything for us......Nuts, fruits, vegetables, mushrooms,
plant based medicines, etc. live within nature. Our bodies know how to metabolize nature but we get sick eating manmade chemicals. Keep it simple like our ancestors did.
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Shelled nuts cost about $10.00 a pound on average but less if bought in bulk. Nuts average about 200 calories per ounce. Prescriptions for heart medicines cost anywhere between a few dollars a month to thousands. A heart attack costs several to many thousands of dollars and much more to your estate if you don't survive.
An ounce of nuts cost about 16 cents. I eat two ounces a day of mixed unsalted nuts. It is one of the least expensive medicines I take.
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Should one be worried about too much exposure to aflatoxin over the course of a nut-heavy lifestyle? Do the makers of nut butters monitor the aflatoxin content?
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Follow-up to mine below: Frequent readers will realize that if one added up all the percentages of reduced risk for CVD and CHD claimed by epidemiologists reported in the Health Section of the NY Times one could achieve, by simple addition, a greater-than 100% reduced risk through diet manipulation alone: 20% by eating nuts five times a week, throw in another 20% for eating dark chocolate (combined as dark chocolate with almond bars?), eating fish twice a week, drinking a little red wine...you get the idea.
Nonsense, of course. Health is certainly not determined by diet alone -- probably not primarily by diet -- and possibly only minimally affected by the details of diet (barring clinical deficiencies).
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Says the person who doesn’t understand the studies.
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Sorry Broussca, but the sad fact is that CAD is primarily genetic- diet can only moderate the risk -talk to any dietitian if you don't believe me.
And people who mock other people's qualifications on a topic should probably provide their own .
I am Nuts for Nuts.....but I am not fooled by this epidemiologists' fantasy of a study.
This type of study proves nothing at all - - - it cannot prove anything by design. There is absolutely no way to isolate the heath effects of a single dietary item from the food frequency questionnaires of prospective health studies.
If one is not allergic to ground or tree nuts, eat them, by all means. There is no doubt that they are good food. But they will not reduce your risk of CVD or CHD.
Eating a well-rounded varied diet, not too much, and getting a minimum of 20-30 minutes of physical activity more days than not will provide one with almost all the protection one will be getting from diet and exercise. There are no magic bullets.
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Another person with little knowledge about the area announcing an opinion as if it were factual.
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One of my favorite meals is a big plate of tomatoes plus whole grain toast with peanut butter. I really like the combination of tomatoes and peanut butter. It's a good breakfast.
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Read nuts not legumes like peanuts.
The article specifically said peanuts, maybe you missed it.
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Elsewhere recently attributed health gains i.e. lower risk of cancer to tree nuts (not peanuts which are a bean). NutritionFacts.Org pushes a handful (how big? Whose hands?) of walnuts daily for heart health. Other write ups say its the ALA in walnuts. Somewhere else the health gains are benefits almonds, and somewhere else (NEJM) says the benefit disappears if the almond skin is discarded.
anyway we eat 1/4 cup mixed tree nuts a day since the rest of our food is a balance of plant foods so simplistically the nuts add protein. BTW researchers example The China Study by prof. T. Colon Campbell say 10% calories protein is best, much more promotes cancer. Take your choice.
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Jerry A - Note that T. Colin Campbell wrote the fawning Forward to Caldwell Esselstyn Jr.’s book Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease, including: “This book is a must read. ... People who ignore its message do so at their own peril.”
So what message do you ignore at your own peril according to Dr. Campbell?
From Esselstyn’s book: “[L]et’s proceed to the rules of my nutrition plan. First, the foods to avoid:
5. NUTS. Those who have heart disease should avoid all nuts. ...”
Avoid all nuts? Did Esselstyn or Campbell have 30 years of data on 210,000 Americans, as in this NYTimes piece, to support such a “rule”? Or a five-year randomized controlled study of 7,000 with hard health outcomes (PREDIMED)? Or a meta-analysis of 20 different datasets (PMID 27916000)?
How can they be SO wrong?
Might I suggest that Esselstyn and Campbell know nothing about which they speak?
Dogma over data. Religion over science.
(P.S. - Rule number 3 on Esselstyn’s list of foods to avoid: “3. Oils. All oils, including virgin olive oil ...”
Shocking how unscientific these guys can be, isn’t it?
See PREDIMED, of course, PMID 23432189, and, e.g., PMID 24775425 & 28394365.)
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@Jerry A:
Getting only 10% of calories from protein is a _minimum_ for a human to be alive and not have a deficiency disease. Most of us are aiming for more than that.
You're misrepresenting Dr. Campbell's position on eating nuts, as well as his endorsement of Dr. Esselstyn's work. Here's a link where Dr. Campbell explains his support of adding nuts to the diet, as well as his nuanced disagreement with Dr. Esselstyn's position on nuts.
http://nutritionstudies.org/evidence-nut-consumption-human-health/
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For years nuts were off limits because they were high in calories and fat. Now nuts are the miracle food. If this is true then this is another example of the medical profession pontificating at the expense of everyone's health.
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What? Nuts are loaded with Saturated Fats, and other fats, which many elderly medical professionals have told us for decades are bad, bad, bad for our hearts and vascular systems.
What? Nuts are loaded with Salt, which many elderly medical professionals have told us for decades are bad, bad, bad for our hearts and vascular systems.
Actually, now they have finally gotten it right. Nuts, it turns out, really are very, very good for us. We need the fats. We need the salt. (And we need the magnesium and potassium.)
But this really is not “news.” The 5-year, 7000-person, Italian PREDIMED Trial basically PROVED that nuts were miracle-workers (along with extra virgin olive oil) in 2013. This was a Randomized Controlled Trial with hard-outcome endpoints, the “gold standard” of epidemiological proof, and one of the ten most important medical RCTs of the last decade. See: PMID 23866098, 23432189, and 24573661.
What is “news” here is that PEANUT consumption (but, interestingly, not peanut-butter) is almost the equivalent as for tree nuts in health outcome effects. That’s been suspected, but not really shown yet. That is great news for Americans. And for those who cannot afford daily handfuls of expensive tree nuts.
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Ooops. PREDIMED was Spanish. Sorry. But still one of the ten most important medical large-scale, long-term, hard-outcome randomized controlled trial of the last decade.
And the results? Those given about 1 ounce of mixed tree nuts suffered about 25% fewer heart attacks, strokes, or deaths from cardiovascular causes over the next five years compared to the controls who were discouraged from eating nuts. 25%! That's better than statins for such a population.
In a large-scale, long-term, hard-outcome randomized controlled trial. Pretty tough to argue with. The 210,000 men and women in the 30-year observational studies mentioned in the new article just confirms the cardiovascular benefits in the American context.
(And so much for saturated fat and other fats, and so much for salt...)
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Don't peanuts fall into the legume family? That would make them preferable as a snack over, say, chips, pretzels, etc, etc., etc.
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Nuts are not naturally high in salt. It's the packaged varieties that have added salt. But even eating those is better than eating no nuts.
Did this study look at whether this association is an artifact of nut eaters eating nuts rather than saturated fat? For example, vegetarians may get their protein though nuts rather than red meat.
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Finally, I'm doing something right.
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And wash the nuts down with a nice Chianti and you'll lower your BP while putting a smile of your face.
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For the parent who does not want to make breakfast grab a roll and a Reese peanut butter cup -- or does the sugar mitigate the effect --prob not.. (PS very similar to nutella!!)
Make America Sane -
While this study showed health benefits for peanuts, it also looked at peanut-butter and did not show them for peanut-butter. Drats.
Does this include seeds, for example sesame seeds?
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The abstract of the actual article (I didn’t yet get to see the full article) indicates that they only studied tree nuts and peanuts.
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Hooper asks if the study includes seeds, e.g. sesame seeds. Ans. Probably not. Although the study is behind a pay wall, one chart is available with the abstract, etc. The chart lists Total nuts, Tree nuts, Walnuts, Peanuts and peanut butter. Since sesame is an annual plant, it cannot be a "tree nut."
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While sesame seeds and other seeds are not nuts, they are still very beneficial to you. Chia seeds, flax seeds, pumpkin seeds, and the many other seeds ARE very good for both heart health and health in general. Honestly, if its an edible plant, you often can't go wrong.... :-)
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