The Benefits of Snacking (on nuts)
Association of Nut Consumption with Total and Cause-Specific Morality.
New England Journal of Medicine
Link: http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa1307352
The paper is powerful in its endorsement for nuts as a way to improve health and decrease mortality. A person who eats nuts 7 times a week or more was 20% less likely to die during the 16 year study following over 50,000 men and women. Whether it was Peanuts or Tree Nuts, there is a clear inverse correlation between consuming nuts and mortality. Moreover, the data suggests a visible sliding scale where the more often a person eats nuts, the less chance of heart disease, cancer, and other major illnesses. A person who eats nuts 3 times a week was associated with a 10% decrease in mortality, compared to the 20% enjoyed by every-day nut eaters. Despite being calorically dense –a handful of nuts can easily be 250 calories- nut eaters actually had slimmer waste-lines and a lower BMI than those who either sparingly ate nuts or avoided them altogether.
Of course with all self-reported survey-based studies it is hard to control for other factors, but the researchers seemed to do a pretty good job. For example, I noticed people who consumed more nuts were also more likely to take vitamins and consume alcohol. Alcohol consumption would be a topic that I would love to know more about, since I have read that it is linked with cancer, but also increased alcohol consumption is linked to lower BMI’s and a lower mortality rate.
Even so, the data certainly doesn’t suggest anything harmful about consuming nuts –there are only upsides. So what does this mean for daily health and eating habits? One thing for certain is that snacking in small meals will likely lead to less over-indulgence in large meals, and the massive spikes of insulin associated with large meals. One thing I loved about my high school and middle school was a mandatory 15 minute break at around 10:15 AM, where kids would snack every morning. Maybe it would be healthy for a culture of a mid-morning snack of nuts to be implemented in all stage of life.