Are nuts good for us?

It´s Christmas time and for many people nuts are a big part of the ‘Christmas diet´. What does the science say about nuts — are they good for us?

There have been various studies on this topic, suggesting that eating nuts are beneficial, and a group of researchers recently piled several studies together to have a closer look at the evidence for this. When researchers combine many studies in a systematic and thorough way to see what the summary of the evidence is, we call it a systematic review and that’s the best way of getting an overview of available evidence on a particular topic.

In this particular systematic review, the researchers wanted to find out whether eating a certain amount of nuts on a daily basis might have a positive effect on developing diseases like heart disease and cancer. When they compiled all the evidence from 20 different studies, the researchers found that eating 28 gram of nuts daily (that’s about a handful) was linked with a reduced risk of getting both heart disease and cancer.

So it seems to be beneficial for our health but we can’t say for sure with this type of research whether the reduction they found in people developing cancer was definitely because of the amount of nuts they were eating. There may be other factors in people’s lives that also contribute to the reduced risk, for example it may be that people had generally a healthy lifestyle and a good balanced diet. These are factors that researchers try to take into account when they analyse all the data from the studies so that the research can be as accurate as possible. However, it is almost impossible to account for all possible factors that are relevant for each individual in the research so we can’t know for sure that the beneficial effect was because of eating nuts and not something else, or perhaps just partly because of eating nuts.

In any case, nuts are high in what we call ‘good fats’ and can definitely be eaten as part of a healthy diet. Remember that unsalted nuts are healthier because too much salt in our diets is not good for our blood pressure.

You can read more about this research on the NHS Choices website.

This article was first published : 15.12.2016