Science’s increasing interest in the effects of diet on health have led to some surprising — and debatable — conclusions lately: chocolate might lower blood pressure, modest red wine consumption seems linked to a lower risk of heart disease. A new study by researchers at the University of Toronto and St. Michael’s Hospital has come up with an intriguing new food health benefit, concluding in a newly published study that eating raw nuts helps control type-2 diabetes.
Consuming two ounces of the food daily as a replacement for carbohydrates in diabetics’ diets’ helps keep blood sugars and bad cholesterol at lower levels, according to the work spearheaded by Dr. David Jenkins, with St. Michael’s and the U of T’s department of nutritional sciences.
The researchers divided 117 diabetics into three groups, with one eating muffins as part of their daily diet, one eating a mix of muffins and nuts and the third noshing on a melange of raw almonds, pistachios, walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, peanuts, cashews, and macadamias. The nut-only eaters saw both their long-term blood-sugar and cholesterol levels fall significantly, the authors report in the journal Diabetes Care. The muffins-only crowd did not improve on either front, while those receiving the muffin-nut combination significantly lowered their blood-cholesterol count.
The U of T notes that the study was partly funded by the International Tree Nut Council and Peanut International, while Dr. Jenkins himself has been paid to consult to the nut council and the Almond Board of California.