Nuts and your risk of dying from cancer or heart disease

Over the years we've written columns on nearly a dozen peer-reviewed studies that focus on nuts and their impact on all sorts of conditions, including poor cholesterol scores, cancer, and type 2 diabetes. This doesn't include those articles written about a Mediterranean-style diet, which includes nuts as one of its nine dietary components.

An international team of scientists, including representatives from Italy, Poland, and the United States, recently pooled the data from multiple prospective studies to look at the effects of nut consumption on the risk of death from all causes or specifically cancer or heart disease (Am J Clin Nutr 2015;101:783-93). Prospective studies are considered far more meaningful than cross-sectional studies, as prospective studies follow participants from one point in time to another, while cross-sectional studies look at a single snapshot in time.

The authors of today's research found 7 prospective studies that looked at all-cause mortality, 6 that looked at risk of death from heart disease, and 2 that looked at risk of death from cancer. In pooling the data from these studies, the effective total number of participants was over 350,000 people.

After analysis, they found that consuming a single serving of nuts per week reduced participants' risk of dying from heart disease by 7% and from all causes by 4%. A serving of nuts per day further reduced their risk of dying from heart disease by 49% and from all causes by 27%. Cancer risk decreased by 14% only when the researchers compared those who ate the most nuts (one or more servings per day) with those who ate the least (less than 1 serving per week or none at all).

There are two caveats here: first, this research shows an association between eating nuts and a lower risk of death from certain causes - it does not prove that eating more nuts is the cause of that reduction in risk. The authors note, further, that those participants who ate more nuts also tended to eat more fruits and vegetables, have a lower Body Mass Index, and were less likely to smoke than those who ate fewer nuts.

What this means for you

This is simply another reason for you to choose nuts - whatever your favorite kind is - as a snack, as a topping for cereals, or added to recipes for texture and flavor. While raw, unsalted nuts would be our first choice, dry roasted and salted are fine if you don't have to worry about your sodium intake and you just don't like raw nuts. Candied nuts are best avoided as snacks.

First posted: April 15, 2015