Health : The Atlantic: Nuts, My Anti-Death

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Nuts, My Anti-Death Nov 21st 2013, 18:27, by James Hamblin Who would win in a fight between nuts and death? (New England Journal of Medicine) Death always wins, but nuts will make it earn its victory, according to a compelling study today from the Harvard School of Public Health. Researchers reviewed records of 27,000 deaths over a 30-year period and found, as Dr. Jeffrey Drazen put it, "a significant reduction in mortality associated with nut consumption." "There is potentially a 20 percent improvement in mortality," said Dr. Charles Fuchs of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, "which is quite striking." Choosing nuts in this case meant eating about a handful of any kind of nut, seven or more times per week, for years. People who ate more nuts were not only less likely to die during the 30-year period, but also, Drazen said, "leaner, less likely to smoke, more likely to exercise, take multivitamins, eat more fruits and vegetables, and drink more alcohol." Even controlling for those associations, the nuts apparently had a significant effect on lifespan, decreasing the likelihood of cancers, strokes, infections, kidney failure, and cardiac disease. (New England Journal of Medicine) Food science can be fickle in that even things we know to contain nutrients, antioxidants, and other things that are good for our cells in dishes in labs don't actually turn out to help us. We've know for a long time that nuts contain all kinds of good stuff, but until now it was just an assumption that eating them would actually translate into this sort of beneficial outcomes in real life. In covering this story, NBC boasted that the singular Dr. Oz has been advocating nuts as one of his "superfoods" for quite some time, saying they are the best single thing you can eat. "They have vitamins, minerals, nutrients, the healthy fats, the fiber," Oz said. "All of this is rolled up in this one little bitty product—which happens to one day give rise to a tree. It only makes sense that if we put it into our bodies, we'd reap the benefits as well." You win this round, Oz.

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