Statistics suggest that only 5.5% of American adults (aged 19-50 years) eat tree nuts, and that’s a real shame, given the many health benefits that walnuts have been proven to confer.
The latest study to ascertain this was conducted by a team from the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, which sought to evaluate whether walnuts can ameliorate the physiological processes of people who have exhibited symptoms of metabolic syndrome, a medley of health problems that comes about from malfunctioning biochemical processes. Metabolic syndrome increases the risk of one developing heart conditions and diabetes.
The study involved 46 participants (28 women, 18 men), aged between 30 and 75 years. They were selected from an initial pool of 346 people, who were eliminated on the basis of factors such as whether or not they had already developed the diseases of interest, or lived on a particular diet (e.g. vegetarian ). The participants selected were all overweight (Body Mass Index > 25), and men had waists greater than 40in. while the women had waists greater than 35. The waist measure is a quick method of checking whether a person has metabolic syndrome.
The participants were then randomly chosen for what would be a crossover trial; one group started with a walnut enriched diet, followed by an 8-week washout and completed the trial with an ad libitum diet. Meanwhile, the other group started with an ad libitum diet, had an 8-week washout, and completed the regime with a walnut enriched diet. The walnut enriched diet required them to eat 56g of English walnuts daily.
Flow mediated vasodilation was used as the primary test for evaluating the possible effects the consumption of walnuts had exerted. Ultrasound scans of the right brachial artery were used to provide this data, which was complemented by readings of serum lipid, blood pressure, insulin resistance and fasting glucose levels.
Results showed that in both groups, there was improvement in vasoactivity in the brachial artery, and systolic blood pressure was reduced but the effect wasn’t considered statistically significant. Low density lipoprotein (LDL), which builds up as plaque in blood vessels, was also reduced in the duration of the study.
Even more importantly, there wasn’t any reported weight gain.
Readings for insulin tolerance improved over the course of the study, suggesting that walnuts had lessened the severity of a couple of these metabolic problems. While long term studies have not yet been conducted to confirm these findings, it is known that walnuts are a rich source of antioxidants, tocopherol, magnesium, and α-linolenic acid, compounds and elements that are significant in several biochemical processes and could explain how they can help restore metabolic functions.
Unless you are allergic to nuts, you should consider adding them to your diet.
Africa Global News Publication
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