Peanuts May Lower Risk Of Death From Heart Disease

This study, with a more ethnically and economically diverse population in the U.S. and China, suggests that nuts can benefit people from a wide variety of backgrounds. "We can now tell people that peanuts are just as good as more expensive tree nuts, and that the benefit isn't just for white, upper class people, it's for everybody," said senior study author Dr. Xiao-Ou Shu, a professor of epidemiology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, in a phone interview. Shu's team studied 71,764 people in the southeastern U.S. - mostly low-income, and about two-thirds African-American - and 134,265 residents of Shanghai. They looked at how many grams of peanuts (including peanut butter) and other nuts participants ate on an average day and sorted them into five groups ranging from a low of less than 0.95 grams to a high of at least 18.45 grams. A peanut - which is technically not a nut (it's a legume) - weighs about one gram, and there are about 28 peanuts in a one ounce serving. The Chinese participants ate far fewer nuts than the Americans, and in both countries women generally ate less than men. Average daily nut consumption ranged from a low of 1.6 grams for Chinese women to a high of 16.4 grams for white men in the U.S. south. In the American study, half the pe...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news