Researchers at Harvard pooled two long-running cohorts, the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, tracking nut intake and death records over three decades.
Across 118,962 women and men, those who ate nuts seven or more times a week had a death rate about 20 percent lower than those who rarely or never ate them, with lower death rates from heart disease, cancer, and respiratory disease as well.
The association held regardless of age, weight, or whether participants smoked, and it did not depend on any single type of nut. It cannot prove the nuts themselves caused the difference, since people who eat nuts daily tend to have other healthy habits, but the size and consistency of the pattern across two large, independent groups kept the finding from being dismissed as noise.
Read the original study
A small daily habit, a measurable difference.
Source
- Bao, Y., Han, J., Hu, F. B., Giovannucci, E. L., Stampfer, M. J., Willett, W. C., & Fuchs, C. S. (2013). Association of nut consumption with total and cause-specific mortality. New England Journal of Medicine, 369(21), 2001–11. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa1307352