Healthy and appetizing, nuts and seeds are absolutely the best snack of the bunch. Helping yourself to a handful of nuts and seeds every day can improve circulation and muscle tone.
Data from the University of Toronto show that replacing 50 grams of carbs (about a muffin’s worth) in your diet with 2.5 ounces of nuts each day helps control blood glucose in people with type-two diabetes. Mice that ate a walnut-rich diet (the equivalent of two ounces daily in humans) were half as likely to develop breast cancer as those that didn’t eat nuts, according to another study.
And nuts and seeds are especially full of arginine, an amino acid that helps to combat heart disease, impotence, infertility, and high blood pressure, and it also facilitates the healing process. Additionally, arginine can stimulate the pituitary gland at the base of the brain.
The pituitary releases growth hormones, which begin to decline quickly in humans after age 35. This means that after 35, your hormones start to plunge and you experience some aging symptoms. The skin loses elasticity, the muscle loses mass and strength, the lean body tissue decreases, fertility and virility decrease, and other signs of aging start to set in.
Nuts are high in fat and are concentrated energy source. However, almonds and walnuts among these are rich in tocopherols (a form of Vitamin-E) - the antioxidant that reduces the risk of artery blockages, stroke, improving blood circulation, and helping keep each cell intact and healthy.
A number of studies have established a body of evidence linking nut consumption to potential beneficial effects for heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease and cancer. Researchers from Loma Linda University (California, USA) studied results of 25 nut consumption trials involving 583 men and women with normal and high cholesterol levels. Results showed that daily consumption of a small bag (67g) of nuts reduced total cholesterol by 5.1% and LDL cholesterol by 7.4%.
Yale University School of Medicine (Connecticut, USA) researchers studied 14 women and 10 men, median age 58 years, with type-2 diabetes, assigning some of them to consume 56 grams of walnuts daily, for 8 weeks. At the conclusion of the study period, the researchers found significant improvements in the function of the blood vessel lining (endothelium), with blood flow improved by 2.2% in the group that consumed walnuts (as compared to 1.2% in the non- supplemented group).
If you’re worried about the nuts’ high fat content, don’t be. Women who consumed two or more nut servings per week had a slightly lower risk of obesity than those who ate nuts less frequently or not at all, the long-running Nurses’ Health Study from the Harvard School of Public Health recently discovered.
