You’ve no doubt heard about all the medical school studies showing that nuts – nuts of all kinds – are good for you and can actually reduce your chance of suffering some diseases. Now, you can add cancer to the list of dreaded conditions that nuts may save you from…
Any or all of the above may be beneficial to your health…
Yup! Another study, this one from Harvard University and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, says eating just a handful of nuts a day can reduce your chance of dieing from heart disease by 29 per cent and from cancer by 11 per cent. Sounds like a pretty good endorsement for nuts.
But… What about the soaring growth of nut allergies in Western Society? It would seem that nuts ‘cut both ways’ – they’re either a triumphant Excalibur or a Sword of Damocles. So, don’t expect your doctor to start prescribing nuts anytime soon.
If you can eat nuts, there are still a couple of major caveats:
First, they’re alleged to be fattening and the ones that come oil roasted and heavily salted are downright addictive – in the same sense as Potato Chips.
Second, they’re expensive. Can you afford to eat even a handful a day? Even if you stick to plain old Peanuts, you’ll be paying at last $10 per kg (2.2 lb.). If you go for Macadamias, Pistachios or Cashews, you can figure on double that price. And, even if you can get a prescription for them, they’re probably not covered by your drug plan.
On the other hand… Some health community experts say that nuts may be the lesser of the evils in our diets. If we resolve to eat more nuts, they may replace less-healthy foods, such as Potato Chips, in our diets. The result would be an overall gain in our health – but because of a lack of stuff that was bad for us, not so much because we ate something (nuts) that was good for us.
So… Take the latest news about nuts just the way you like ’em – with a pinch of salt.
And check out our recent post about ‘Brain Foods’ and other miracle edibles…
~ Maggie J.