Eating Nuts Decreases The Risk Of Heart Disease, Cancer, And Premature Death

According to the CDC, Heart disease and Cancer are the biggest killers in the US. Together they claim more than 1 million lives per year. Heart diseasealone is the cause of 1 in every 4 deaths in the United States. And it’s the leading cause of death in both men and women. But now a new study from BMC Medicine shows that eating just an ounce of nuts per day can significantly reduce your risk of both! (Unless you’re allergic! Just ignore all this if you can’t eat nuts!)

The research shows that adding even this small amount of nuts to your diet can decrease your risk of heart disease by up to 30 percent, and it showed similarly spectacular numbers with cancer and premature death. The study found that cancer risk went down by 15 percent and premature death by 22 percent.

Nuts have always been known to be a superfood with health benefits ranging from helping respiratory disease to diabetes. And as co-author of the study, Dagfinn Aune, said, “Nuts and peanuts are high in fibre, magnesium, and polyunsaturated fats – nutrients that are beneficial for cutting cardiovascular disease risk and which can reduce cholesterol levels.”

“Some nuts, particularly walnuts and pecan nuts are also high in antioxidants, which can fight oxidative stress and possibly reduce cancer risk.”

We’ve known that there were health benefits involved in eating nuts, but this study led by researchers from Imperial College London and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology was a huge deal because it involved analyzing 29 studies with over 819,000 patients. And with that large of a sample, its conclusions were stunning. The researchers found that eating just a handful of walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, cashews, pistachios, pecans or peanuts (which are technically legumes) daily produced these significant drops in disease.

This is great news for everyone but especially those with increased risk of heart disease and cancer! It’s such an easy thing to add to your diet (just a handful of nuts) and it leads to significant results. As Aune said, “It’s quite a substantial effect for such a small amount of food.”

Which sounds great to us! So grab a handful of nuts and throw them in the air like you just don’t care…or you know, eat them. Because throwing them isn’t shown to have any significant health benefits. Though, we guess it could be counted as exercise. But who wants to do that?