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Why Dietitians Won’t Shut Up About Nuts
Eating a handful of nuts on a regular basis is good for you, but where are the snack’s health benefits coming from?
If you regularly snack on nuts, you can trace your healthy habit back to a nutrition lab in Southern California. The year was 1990, and Joan Sabaté, MD, DrPH, executive director of the Center for Nutrition at the School of Public Health at Loma Linda University, was studying the potential effects of walnuts on heart health. At the time, thinking that nuts could have any health benefits was a long shot. Almost relegated to the realm of “forbidden foods,” nuts were known for being high in fat and calories. They were far from a health food.
Yet Sabaté’s results, which he published in a landmark study in a 1993 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, fundamentally changed how health experts thought about nuts. The study highlighted both their nutritional powers and cholesterol-lowering abilities, which worked to improve cardiovascular health.
Since then, hundreds of studies that have expanded and confirmed a wide variety of health benefits of nuts — perhaps part of the reason you’re snacking them today.
