It seems that nuts just can’t beat the rap of their undeserved reputation for being fatty. An important new study tries one more time. Nuts, it confirmed, are good for cholesterol.
Despite a massive body of evidence that nuts are good for protecting you from heart disease, from dying from heart disease and for improving cholesterol, they have had difficulty shaking their bad reputation. Now a comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis of controlled studies has shown, once again, that nuts are effective at actually improving your cholesterol.
The massive study included 113 controlled studies that included 8,060 people. The studies compared the cholesterol effect of an average of 45.5g a day of nuts to eating no nuts.
Eating nuts moderately reduced total cholesterol and the heart harmful LDL cholesterol. It also led to small reductions in triglycerides.
Nuts also reduced apolipoprotein B. Apolipoprotein B carries the bad LDL and VLDL cholesterol to their destinations in your body. It refuses the ride to the good HDL cholesterol. High apolipoprotein B means high levels of heart harmful cholesterol. An Apo B test may be more accurate than a lipid panel testing all the types of cholesterol for determining your risk of cardiovascular disease.
Though nuts did not increase the healthy HDL cholesterol, they did improve the ratio of total cholesterol and bad cholesterol to the good HDL cholesterol.
The strong finding that eating nuts improves apolipoprotein B and that it lowers LDL cholesterol adds, once again, to the evidence that eating nuts has a positive affect on cholesterol.
Nutrition, Metabolism and Cardiovascular Diseases. Oct 2024;doi.org/10.1016/j.numecd.2024.10.009.