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28.12.2013

Eat nuts or peanuts and live longer

If you eat nuts or peanuts regularly your risk of dying is lower than if you don't. According to a study published by epidemiologists at Harvard Medical School in the New England Journal of Medicine, a diet that is high in nuts and peanuts extends your life expectancy by offering protection against almost all kinds of fatal disease.

Study
The Harvardians used data on over one hundred thousand people - 76,464 women and 42,498 men - for their study. The researchers asked them to keep a record of the amount of nuts or peanuts they ate every 2-4 years from the 1980s up to 2010.

Results
A high peanut and nut intake reduced the subjects' mortality risk by about twenty percent the researchers discovered.

The protective effect of nuts had already been shown in similar epidemiological studies, but this one produced even more intriguing results. Nuts and peanuts reduced not only the chance of dying from cardiovascular problems, but also the chance of dying from cancer, diabetes, infectious diseases, lung and kidney diseases and 'non-classified' diseases.

It was also noticeable that consuming nuts and peanuts protected pretty much everyone in the group: young and old, men and women, light and heavy, drinkers and non-drinkers, supplements users and non-users, athletes and non-athletes.

Peanuts are not nuts, but when the researchers split the results up between 'tree nuts' and 'peanuts', there was no noticeable difference.

Nutritionists have long thought that nuts contain fatty acids that help improve the cholesterol balance. This might explain why nuts and peanuts protect the heart and blood vessels. But if you look at how broad the protective effect of nuts is they must contain other important bioactive substances.

Conclusion
"In conclusion, our analysis [...] showed significant inverse associations of nut consumption with total and cause-specific mortality", the researchers conclude. "Nonetheless, epidemiologic observations establish associations, not causality, and not all findings from observational studies have been confirmed in controlled, randomized clinical trials."

Source:
N Engl J Med. 2013 Nov 21;369(21):2001-11.

More:
More almonds, fewer wrinkles 17.10.2019
Eat a handful of nuts every day and you'll live almost two years longer 22.07.2017
Nuts increase survival chances of prostate cancer patients 05.05.2017

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