Eating nuts daily may help you live longer, study says

(CBS News) A groundbreaking medical study suggests that eating nuts may help you stay alive. The report, in the New England Journal of Medicine, looks at more than 100,000 Americans over 30 years. It shows people who ate nuts every day are more likely to live longer.

CBS News medical contributor Dr. Holly Phillips told the “CBS This Morning” co-hosts that this is an “interesting” study and the “largest of its kind” that actually looked at daily consumption of nuts.

“What the researchers found were that compared with people who didn’t have nuts at all, people who had nuts seven days a week, had a twenty percent decrease to death rate compared to the others that didn’t,” she said.

Phillips explained that this was not a “cause and effect study,” which means that they cannot say that it is “eating the nuts that increased your lifespan.” However, they can say that there is a link between eating nuts and living longer.

She said that the other interesting link that came out of this study was even though nuts are really fatty, people who ate them daily actually weighed less than those who did not.

Phillips explained that the number of nuts that should be eaten a day is just a small amount. She explained that you only need “about eight or nine” almonds to get the perceived benefits and to go for the “unsalted form” of the snack.

“Even though nuts do have a lot of fat, it’s the good fat. It’s the unsaturated kind, like what you would find in olive oil,” she said. “They also have a lot of fiber, vitamins, minerals and they are filling, so you may be less likely to reach for something that’s not as healthy if you have nuts.”