Eat Your Walnuts

It’s time to eat some walnuts!

When people in the study added 56 grams of walnuts (2 ounces, or about 14 walnuts) to their daily diet for six months, they improved blood vessel function and reduced “bad” LDL cholesterol that builds up in blood vessels and leads to blood clots and heart attacks.

“Adding walnuts to your diet will improve your diet quality and health – cardiometabolic health specifically – and you can add walnuts without fear of weight gain because they are very satiating and appear to bump out other calories quite reliably and make room for themselves,” said study author Dr. David L. Katz of the Yale University Prevention Research Center in Derby, Connecticut.

Walnuts of course cannot help with everything: 

The nuts didn’t seem to improve high blood pressure and high blood sugar, two other risk factors for diabetes, Katz and colleagues reported in BMJ Open Diabetes Research and Care.

Which is why walnut consumption needs to be part of an overall healthy diet. 

After taking into account factors such as age, exercise habits, calorie consumption and fatty acid intake, the study found that walnuts were linked to improved diet quality regardless of whether people received nutrition counseling.

Please keep in mind this: 

The California Walnut Commission funded the study and has compensated Katz for speaking engagements.

One limitation of the research is that participants weren’t given specific foods to consume and diets were assessed based on self-reported surveys asking people at several points to recall what they ate in the previous 24 hours, the authors acknowledge. The study also wasn’t designed to show whether walnuts could prevent diabetes, which makes the results less reliable.

Even though the data from the study suggest that adding walnuts to the diet can help maintain overall healthy eating habits, more research from larger and longer-term studies is still needed to fully understand the potential benefits of walnuts, said Roberta Holt, a nutrition researcher at the University of California, Davis, who wasn’t involved in the study. Results from the periodic diet surveys aren’t enough to prove walnuts caused the changes in LDL cholesterol or blood vessel function, Holt added by email.

“While the intake of walnuts improved LDL cholesterol and vascular function from baseline, the control (no walnuts) also improved,” Holt noted.

Actionable

There is plenty of research linking consumption of walnuts to improved markers of heart health and lower risks of diabetes and heart disease. Deirdre Tobias, an epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston noted that “Walnuts and other tree nuts are a healthful source of plant-based protein and fat,” and “They are a food that (is) consistent with overall dietary recommendations and can easily be incorporated into a patient’s diet, if they like walnuts and are not allergic.”