Eating More Nuts May Help Prevent Weight Gain

Nuts have a wide variety of health benefits, and recent studies have been uncovering more and more of them.

From staving off heart disease to improving men’s sexual function, Medical News Today has reported on many of the studies that have hailed nuts’ protective effects.

For instance, a daily intake of nuts may also reduce the risk of other illnesses, such as diabetes and cancer, and slash the risk of mortality from any cause.

But what is the relationship between daily nut consumption and weight gain? Two studies published last year found that a daily serving of nuts may keep away the extra weight that we tend to put on as adults.

Now, new research, appearing in the journal BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health, strengthens those findings.

Xiaoran Liu, Ph.D., a research associate in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in Boston, MA, and colleagues set out to examine the effects of eating more nuts on weight control.

Studying nut consumption in a large sample

Liu and colleagues analyzed data on weight, diet, and exercise patterns in three groups of people:

• 27,521 men who had enrolled in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study between 1986 and 2010
• 61,680 women who had participated in the Nurses’ Health Study between 1986 and 2010
• 55,684 women, who tended to be younger than those in the second group, and who had participated in the Nurses’ Health Study II between 1991 and 2011

The participants were free from any chronic disease at the start of the study. Every 4 years, they answered questions about their weight and nut consumption on a questionnaire.

The questionnaire enquired how often the participants consumed 28-gram servings of nuts.

The researchers also evaluated participants’ exercise patterns through questionnaires every 2 years. The scientists assessed exercise using metabolic equivalent of a task — MET — hours, which indicate how many calories a person has burned per hour of physical activity.