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Forget about statins! Eat lots of nuts instead

05/12/2010 00:08:00 admin
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Don't want to take statins to lower your cholesterol?  Eat lots of nuts!

Eating a lot of nuts may help lower cholesterol and improve your heart health, a new study by Dr. Joan Sabate of Loma Linda University in California suggests.

Greater benefits were found particularly in those who were thin, ate less healthful diets, and those with high levels of bad cholesterol and blood fats, the researchers reported.

For the study, Sabate et al meta-analyzed data pooled from 25 studies from seven countries including 583 men and women with some having high cholesterol and some having normal cholesterol and found the association.

They found eating an average intake of 67 grams or 2.4 ounces of nuts each day cut the subjects' total cholesterol by about 5 percent, reduced LDL (bad) cholesterol by 7 percent and improved the ratio of total cholesterol or LDL cholesterol to good HDL cholesterol.

The observations make sense, according to the researchers, because nuts contain healthy substances such as good fats, fiber and antioxidants among other things.

Even though nuts were found associated with 21 percent lower triglycerides in people with high blood fats, they had no effect on triglycerdies in subjects with normal levels.

The researchers further found the benefits were more significant in people who had high bad cholesterol, or lower body weight, or ate more Western diets.

The study was published in May 2010 in Archives of Internal Medicine.

The apparent benefits can be directly associated with cardiovascular health.

Sabate and Wien M also published a study in 2010 in Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition saying that frequent nut consumption has been found protective against coronary heart disease.

They wrote in their study report that "nuts have a unique fatty acid profile and feature a high unsaturated to saturated fatty acid ratio, an important contributing factor to the beneficial health effects of nut consumption."

Nuts contain cardioprotective nutrients including vegetable protein, fiber, alpha-tocopherol, folic acid, magnesium, copper, phytosterols and other phytochemicals.

David Liu
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