Peanuts linked to same heart, longevity benefits as more pricey nuts

Nuts, a food you may have been avoiding because of their high fat content, have been gaining traction as an all-natural health food. Tree nuts like almonds, pecans, and walnuts are especially prized for their rich cargo of vitamins, minerals, and mono- and polyunsaturated fats. The downside is that tree nuts tend to be pricey. But a study published online this week in JAMA Internal Medicine puts the humble peanut squarely in the same nutritional league as its upscale cousins. This work makes the health benefits of nuts more accessible to lower-income shoppers. An international team of researchers found that in more than 200,000 people from Savannah to Shanghai, those who regularly ate peanuts and other nuts were substantially less likely to have died of any cause — particularly heart disease — over the study period than those who rarely ate nuts. This adds to the existing evidence from two Harvard-led investigations — the Nurses’ Health Study and the Harvard Professionals Follow-up Study. “This confirms what we found a few years ago — and our results were greeted with intense skepticism,” says Dr. Meir Stampfer, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Botanically, peanuts are not nuts, but nutritionally they are very similar to tree nuts, and other studies have shown their benefits,” Dr Stampfer explains. Any botanist worth his or her salt will tell you that peanuts aren’t nuts. The...
Source: New Harvard Health Information - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Healthy Eating Heart Health peanut peanuts Source Type: news