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pistachios

Adding This Simple Snack Can Extend Your Life

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nuts and heart attack
Photo courtesy of heart disease, nut consumption, almonds, walnuts, pecans, pistachios, cashews

Sure–you know that avoiding smoking, exercising regularly and eating lots of veggies and fruits will help you live longer.  But can one simple snack extend your life?

Turns out that if the snack consists of different types of nuts the answer is probably a solid yes.  The benefits of nuts on our long-term health is well-documented.  They protect your brain, they protect against diabetes and they strongly protect your heart.  And the benefits are not isolated to a single type of nut–it seems like every time researchers look at a particular type of nut it shows a protective effect on whatever chronic disease that happens to be in the study.

However, there are a few very important factoids to take into account.

First, raw nuts are the best option.  Absolutely, positively NO added oils.  That means cottonseed oil, peanut oil and any other oil manufacturers try to stuff into the nut container.  These added oils will completely counteract the benefits of the nuts.  Personally, I buy bulk bags of almonds, pecans and walnuts from Costco because their prices on these 3 types of nuts is the lowest you can find.  Then, when Sprouts has other types of nuts on sale, like cashews or hazelnuts, I add them to the mix.  If I’m feeling really rich, I’ll splurge on a pound of macadamia nuts.

Next, I really don’t concern myself over added salt.  The research linking low salt diets and chronic disease is very weak and likely is more due to the presence of high levels of sodium (and low potassium) in processed foods.  Personally, however, I prefer to match my nuts with dark chocolate drops instead of salt to spruce up the experience.

Either way, the addition of nuts to your daily routine is a powerful one.  But just how powerful?  This particular study asked this very question.  It looked at 17,184 residents of Spain over the course of 5 years to see if nut consumption had any effect on the participants risk of dying from any cause (all-cause mortality).  Here’s what they found:

  • Those participants who ate nuts at least twice per week had a 56% lower risk of dying when compared to non-nut consumers.

These are some pretty serious numbers.

This powerful effect of nuts is likely due to several factors present within nuts.  First, they help you avoid snacking on other, less healthy, snacks.  The fat present in nuts (polyunsaturated and monunsaturated) has consistently shown to protect your heart from damage.  Lastly, they are an excellent source of gamma tocopherol–the powerhouse form of vitamin E that has been shown again and again to protect the brain and the heart.

Either way, if you are not already snacking on nuts during a typical week, it’s definitely time to start.

 

Foods with Fat do NOT Make You Fat!! 7 Reasons to Eat MORE Fat

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pistachios and prediabetes
Pistachios help fight off diabetes

A decade of brainwashing by the USDA’s food guide pyramid putting “fats and oils: use sparingly” at the top of the diagram is hard to undo.

So hard that, despite continual reminders at holiday gatherings, even my own mother still avoids olive-oil based salad dressings, replacing them with high fructose corn syrup or, even worse (gasp!!), salad dressings with sucralose. (Her dedication to eating low fat is so strong that, even after reading this post, it won’t change her habits…).

To clarify, bad fats will always be bad. Fats like trans fats (the all-evil partially hydrogenated oils), animal based fats, high levels of omega-6 fats (corn, soybean, cottonseed, peanut, sunflower oils) should be avoided as much as possible.

The healthy fats, however, have NEVER been shown to lead to weight gain. Now, I could be wrong in using the term “never” but I don’t really think so. Our body needs and functions well with healthy fats such as those found in wild caught fish (or, if you don’t like fish, you can just eat the algae and seaweed directly), avocados, olive oil and nuts.

Nuts.

Eating pistachios may reduce your body’s response to the stresses of everyday life, according to a Penn State study conducted by principal investigator Sheila G. West, professor of biobehavioral health and nutritional sciences.

I don’t think I’ve ever come across a study using nuts that did not show a positive benefit on our health. And it doesn’t seem to matter whether we’re talking about almonds, cashews, walnuts, hazelnuts, Brazil nuts or pecans—they all have been shown to be good for us and help us fight off heart disease and diabetes.

This particular study adds pistachios to the list, as would be expected. In this study, researchers replace 20% of the calories in a group of prediabetic patients’ diets with unsalted pistachios for 24 weeks to see what effect this had on markers of diabetes. Here’s what they found:

1. Waist circumference improved.
2. Fasting blood sugar improved.
3. Total cholesterol improved.
4. LDL (the “bad”) cholesterol improved.
5. The inflammatory marker TNF-α improved.
6. TBARS (a marker of oxidative stress) improved.
7. Adiponectin levels (a hormone produced by fat cells that protects against diabetes) improved.

Could we ask for anything more?

In a typical 2,000 calorie per day diet, replacing 400 calories with pistachios would equal just over a 1/2 cup of pistachios. Not exactly a difficult intervention.

Personally, I’ve become attached to the POM brand salt and pepper pistachios that I buy from Costco (or you can get them at Amazon by clicking here). They do have a wee bit of sugar, but not enough to counterbalance the positive effects of the pistachios themselves and the added spices as well.

One little caveat—never eat nuts with added oils, like peanut or cottonseed oil. This completely destroys the healthy benefits of the good fats. Other than that little rule, feel free to munch away.