A handful of almonds a day, can help keep the doctor away!

A handful of nuts a day can help to keep the doctor — and the undertaker — away.

Almonds are a smart snack, studies have shown on reasons why almonds are beneficial for heart health: eating almonds can help lower your bad LDL level while maintaining your good HDL cholesterol levels — and can actually help your good HDL cholesterol work better.

Adding almonds to your diet lowers your LDL cholesterol, or bad cholesterol, which is involved in creating plaques in your coronary arteries that can cause heart attacks. Almonds lower LDL in a dose-dependent manner. This means that by increasing the amount of almonds you eat, you can further lower your LDL. Clinical diet studies show almonds can also reduce your risk of insulin resistance and diabetes. Even if you have diabetes, adding almonds to your diet can improve your sensitivity to insulin.

Almonds can also increase your likelihood of losing weight. In one study, adding 84 gm, or about 3 ounces (oz) of almonds a day to a planned diet improved weight loss and resulted in a 14 percent decrease in waist circumference. A study published in 2015 looked at cholesterol and body fat in people who ate 1.5 oz of almonds a day versus a healthy muffin with similar calories. In only six weeks, people who consumed almonds had lower LDL cholesterol by an average of 5 mg/dL. They also had less belly fat and leg fat.

In a study published in Metabolism, the consumption of 2 ounces of almonds (about 45) was associated with lower levels of fasting insulin and fasting glucose. This amount has 340 calories. The key in this study is that the participants reduced their caloric intake by enough to accommodate the addition of the almonds so that no extra calories were consumed. In another study published in the Journal of American College of Nutrition, there was evidence that eating almonds could help increase insulin sensitivity in people with prediabetes.

There are also several studies showing eating almonds lowers body inflammation.

If you are looking to shrink your waist and improve your cholesterol, start by adding some almonds to your diet.