The Doctor's Diet: Dr. Travis Stork's STAT Program to Help You Lose Weight & Restore Your Health (34 page)

The doctor in me loves nuts even more than the hungry eater in me. Really big studies that look at people’s food intake, disease risk, and death rates over long periods of time have found that people who eat nuts tend to live longer than those who don’t. This doesn’t surprise me because compounds in nuts help fight off several of the chronic diseases
that land people in the hospital, including heart disease and diabetes.

There’s also some evidence nuts—especially walnuts—may offer cancer protection as well, although there hasn’t been a huge amount of research done into the effect on specific kinds of cancer.

Last but not least, nuts are an important weight-loss tool—which is really the number one reason that they’re part of The Doctor’s Diet. Nuts and nut butters are a very effective way to lose weight and keep it off permanently, so they’re part of every phase of The Doctor’s Diet.

I ask you: What’s not to love about these portable little packets of nutrition and flavor? If you aren’t eating nuts (and assuming you’re not allergic to them), now’s a really good time to start adding them to your diet.

Some 20 years ago, researchers started to shine an intense light on nuts, looking to quantify their impact on our diets. Nuts are an integral part of the Mediterranean diet, which has been associated with some dramatic health benefits. (The Mediterranean diet is an eating pattern that focuses on fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, legumes, seeds, herbs and spices, seafood, and olive oil, while incorporating some dairy foods and eggs and limiting sweets and red meat.)

Nuts have been the topic of many large studies in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere in the world. The results consistently point toward nuts being an important food for good health and weight loss.

For example, we recently heard about the results of PREDIMED, a Spanish study of 7,216 men and women ages 55 to 90 with elevated risk of heart disease. For about five years, the study compared the health of people who ate nuts with those who didn’t eat nuts. The findings, published in 2013 in the journal
BMC Medicine
, showed that nut eaters were less likely to die during the study than non–nut eaters. Here are some specifics:

People who ate one to three servings of nuts (1 ounce, or 28 grams) each week were 29 percent less likely to die during the study period than those who ate no nuts.

People who ate three or more servings of nuts weekly were even less likely to die (39 percent) during the study than those who did not eat nuts.

The results are even better for heart disease and cancer: people in the study who ate three or more servings of nuts a week were 55 percent less likely to die from heart disease and 40 percent less likely to die from cancer.

Those who ate nuts had, on average, a smaller body mass index and waist size than those who didn’t.

Nuts have a lot of things going for them, health-wise, including the following:

Slimming power.
Even though they’re delicious and relatively high in fat, nuts actually help with weight loss. Take a look at the research on nuts and weight and you’ll find that, to put it simply, people who eat nuts tend to weigh less than those who don’t.

For example, a 2011 study of more than 120,000 men and women in the US published in the
New England Journal of Medicine
found that people who ate nuts gained noticeably less weight over the course of 20 years than those who didn’t. Similarly, a 2007 study published in the journal
Obesity
showed that participants who ate nuts two or more times per week were 31 percent less likely to gain weight after 28 months than those who rarely ate nuts.

Other studies have shown that weight loss is more likely to succeed when people are following reduced-calorie diets. Subjects in these studies find they are better able to stick with their eating plans and lose weight if they include nuts in their diet. What it comes down to is this: a weight-loss diet is simply more filling, more palatable, and more enjoyable when it contains nuts.

Hunger zappers.
Nuts are very filling—in fact, the combination of protein, fat, and fiber in nuts makes them one of the most filling foods out there. In nutrition studies, when researchers ask subjects to add nuts to
their diet, the subjects tend to eat less of other foods even if the researchers don’t ask them to cut back. People who eat nuts feel full enough after eating them that they naturally skip eating other (often less-healthy) foods.

Nuts can be a real gift if you struggle with hunger pangs. The nutrition equation in nuts—protein + fiber + healthy fat—is a just-right hunger fighter that can satisfy your appetite for hours after you eat them.

How long do nuts stay with you? Longer than you might think, according to a 2013 study published in the
British Journal of Nutrition
. In this study, participants who had either 1.5 ounces of peanuts or 3 tablespoons of peanut butter (about a serving and a half) at breakfast reported that they had lower desire to eat for 8 to 12 hours after their morning meal compared with people who had no nuts at breakfast. (They had a high-carbohydrate breakfast instead.) Researchers looked at the study participants’ blood and found that those who ate peanuts or peanut butter had higher levels of a hormone called peptide YY, which promotes fullness and satiety.

Sugar balancers.
One of the reasons nuts are such great hunger fighters is that their protein, fat, and fiber content all work together to keep blood sugar stable. Eat a sugary snack and your blood sugar will zoom up fast, spark a rush of insulin production, and then fall down rapidly, triggering hunger, crankiness, and a craving for more sugary snacks. But eat a handful of nuts, which are very low on the glycemic index, and your blood sugar will rise slowly, eliciting a reasonable and stable insulin response, and then fall gradually, without all the cravings, hunger pangs, and nutritional drama of a sweet snack.

Over time, the blood sugar stability promoted by nuts seems like it may help lower the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. And in people with diabetes, replacing high-carbohydrate foods with nuts can help keep blood sugar in control. In fact, a 2011 study published in the journal
Diabetes Care
found that people with diabetes who replaced high-carb
foods in their diet with two ounces a day of nuts saw significant decreases in tests of HbA1c, which are used to monitor long-term blood sugar control.

In the Nurses’ Health Study, a large, long-term study of women’s health, eating an ounce of nuts five or more times a week was associated with a 27 percent decrease in developing type 2 diabetes.

Fiber phenoms.
Nuts contain anywhere from 2 to 3 grams of fiber per 1 ounce (28 gram) serving. Not only does fiber fill you up, but eating a high-fiber diet (21 to 25 grams daily for women, 30 to 38 grams daily for men) is associated with successful weight loss, heart health, lower diabetes rates, lower risk of some kinds of cancer, and an overall increase in digestive health.

Protein shell-out.
Protein helps satiate your hunger and plays a role in successful weight loss. A serving of nuts contains about 8 grams of protein.

Just what the cardiologist ordered.
Nuts improve your blood lipid profile—which means they help lower your total cholesterol, help bring down LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, reduce triglycerides, and raise HDL (“good”) cholesterol. Four large studies that followed the health of over 160,000 men and women showed that eating about 1 ounce of peanuts daily cut the risk of heart disease in half. That’s a huge benefit!

Why do nuts help with heart health? We don’t know all the reasons, but we do know a few. Some nuts, such as peanuts, are high in a compound called arginine, which can help open blood vessels and allow blood to flow more easily. Walnuts contain especially high levels of alpha-linolenic acid, which appears to help blood vessel walls increase their elasticity. (In people with heart disease, blood vessels can get stiff, hard, and inflexible.)

In the PREDIMED study I mentioned earlier, people who ate primarily walnuts had even lower rates of death from heart disease and cancer than people who ate other kinds of nuts.

Source of “good” fat.
Nuts are a wonderful source of healthy fats. All nuts contain monounsaturated fats, and walnuts provide omega-3 fatty acids (which, as previously mentioned, are also found in salmon and other fatty fish). These fats contribute to heart health, help keep blood sugar stable, and may lower the risk of type 2 diabetes.

Nutty nutrients.
Although different kinds of nuts have slightly different nutrient profiles, they generally are a good source of calcium, magnesium, potassium, vitamin E, and folate. Several of these nutrients,
especially magnesium, potassium, and folate, are known to play a big role in heart health. They also provide a range of disease-fighting phytochemicals, such as phenolic acids, polyphenols, and phytosterols.