Are You Just Going Nuts?
By David Williams
This really is about nuts you eat, not how you feel. But although some of us love eating nuts, only 2% of Australians are eating the recommended daily intake, so many of us could be missing out on nutritional benefits. Good nutrition is the basis of good preventive health outcomes, which in turn help us to feel better and more resilient — a virtuous cycle.
Nuts are not the only factor of course — but thinking about them could motivate us to a wider sense of engagement with a healthy diet.
The recommended daily intake of nuts (from the Heart Foundation) is just 30 grams — about a handful. Nuts contribute to a reduced risk of heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, and a reduced risk of death from all causes. They have a favourable impact on our cholesterol profile.
Why are nuts good for us?
Nuts are nutrient dense foods — a lot of good stuff in a small package. They help us manage cholesterol levels by shifting us away from unhealthy saturated fats, as well as being a nice replacement for less healthy snacks like chips and biscuits. Nuts contain a wide range of important minerals too and provide important fibre.
Roasted and salted nuts are commonly available alongside raw nuts. The limited evidence available suggests that roasting does not much affect their good fat profile but added salt is better avoided as a general diet approach.
It’s not as if nuts are the solution to everything, but they are part of a good way of eating. The Heart Foundation provides a nutrition action plan (including nuts) for maintaining a healthy diet, which you can access here.
Which Nuts?
Nuts that frequently come up favourably in nutrition literature include almonds, peanuts, walnuts, and pistachios. Less often include pecans, hazelnuts, macadamias, brazil nuts, and cashews but each of them has some advantages.
Eating a variety of nuts is best because they contain different levels of healthy fats and minerals.
Other issues with nuts
Nuts may not be suitable for everyone. In Australia, allergies to nuts arise in about 2 people in every 100. A nut allergy develops when the body’s immune system becomes over-sensitive to a protein in a nut. If the allergy issue concerns you, there is an excellent guide to nut allergies here.
‘Nuts make you fat’ is a common rejoinder when suggested in a diet. However, at the daily level suggested, this myth does not hold up. Nuts are nutrient dense, so overindulging is unnecessary to benefit from them.
Changes to our diet will increasingly be influenced by their environmental impacts. Nuts can assist in a shift to more plant-based foods. Nut production overall has a high water requirement but this can vary considerably from relatively low (peanuts) to relatively high (cashews). Currently, Australia is a net importer of peanuts, pistachios, hazelnuts, walnuts, and cashews. It is a next exporter of almonds, macadamias, and pecans. So your choice of nuts can be influenced by source, availability, and price as well as by environmental issues.
The bottom line is that nuts can help you feel good in many ways.
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