Love your peanuts; they’re good for your health.

Nuts could reduce cholesterol levels in the body, says Associate Professor Rachel Brown of the University of Otago, New Zealand.

However, nut consumption is low in Kiwi Land, observes Professor Brown who heads the university’s nut research group.

New Zealand’s Heart Foundation has issued a guideline which recommends, among other things, the consumption of 30 grams of raw nuts a day to reduce the risks of having a heart disease.

Now 30 grams is just a handful, really.

And yet New Zealand’s mean population nut intake of 3.5 grams a day is well below the Heart Foundation’s recommended 30 grams, reports Jennifer Bowden in The New Zealand Listener, a weekly magazine.

Nuts – including peanuts– are rich in micronutrients such as folate, niacin, vitamin E and vitamin B6 and rich in macronutrients such as monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids and dietary fiber.

Nuts are also good sources of phytoestrogens, phytochemicals and essential minerals, copper, magnesium, potassium, and zinc.

“Eating whole nuts while wearing dentures or partial dentures or with several missing teeth can be difficult, with potential for dentures to become dislodged and pieces of nut to get stuck under dentures or in the gaps of missing teeth,” says Ms. Bowden.

Reporting the findings of Professor Brown’s research group, she says “a more comfortable option may be nut butters, either on toast or sandwiches or added to a smoothie and blended so there are no solid bits.”

What puzzles Professor Brown, she writes, is that not many New Zealanders know about the health benefits of nuts. Indeed, many general practitioners do not recommend nuts as part of beneficial diets that lowers the risks of cardiovascular diseases.

In a survey of health professionals and the general public perception of nuts, the research group found that very few New Zealanders have been told by a health professional to eat more nuts.

“Nut consumption is related to a reduction in ‘bad’ LDL cholesterol and the risk of heart disease,” says Professor Brown who has co-authored a number of studies looking at the benefits of nuts to cardiovascular health.

“That tends to be shown in epidemiological studies, where we follow groups for years, and in clinical trials when we give people nuts and their cholesterol comes down.”

Cardiovascular disease is New Zealand’s, and the world’s, leading cause of death, Ms. Bowden says.

She writes about a study published in 2013 in the New England Journal of Medicine shows a link between nut consumption and reduced risk of death as a result of heart disease, respiratory disease and cancer.

Another study in the United States found that nut consumption lowers the risk of death from heart disease and all-cause mortality.

Ms. Bowden cites a study, published in Circulation Research last February, finding that higher consumption of nuts, especially tree nuts, reduces the risk of heart disease and premature deaths among patients with type 2 diabetes.

Tree nuts include cashews, almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, and pecans.

Ms. Bowden also mentions “strong evidence,” cited in the World Cancer Research Fund 2018 report “Diet, Nutrition, Physical Activity and Cancer: A Global Perspective,” that foods rich in fiber, such as nuts, “probably” reduce the risk of colorectal cancer.

The Yale Cancer Center, in a study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, found that patients with stage 3 colon cancer who regularly eat nuts are at significantly lower risk of cancer recurrence.

The study, Ms. Bowden reports, found that those who regularly consume at least two 28-gram servings of nuts a week have a 42 percent improvement in disease-free survival and a 57 percent improvement in overall survival./WDJ