CENTER UPDATE

Does nut eating cause weight gain?

"Frequent nut consumption is associated with lower rates of coronary artery disease (CAD)," according to a recent report in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. But if you eat a lot of nuts, which are high in fat, will you gain weight and have high cholesterol?

Donald Davis. Ph.D. and a consultant at The Center, says no. For several years, he has been supporting eating nuts through his Lunch and Lectures and other work while he has been at The Center. But the researcher, Joan Sabate, who is from the Departments of Nutrition and Epidemiology and School of Public Health, Loma Linda University, wanted to find out if eating nuts could be a cause for the high rate of obesity seen in the United States during the time Doctor Davis has been preaching that we should be eating nuts.

To do this, she checked the published literature for the last 24 years. This included Dr. Levine's study on the absorption of peanuts, peanut oil, and peanut butter that was reported in The New England of Medicine in 1980 to a recent article on nut consumption and decreased risk of sudden cardiac death that appeared in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

First, she found that, "Although differing in methodology and dietary control, collectively these investigations provide [substantial] evidence that short-term consumption of moderate to large amounts of nuts does not increase weight."

Secondly, she found that people who eat nuts may tend to engage in higher levels of physical activity than people who don't eat nuts. Thirdly, she learned that nuts might increase the resting energy expenditure because of their high-protein and unsaturated fat content. This just may result in less fat storage in nut eaters.

"The current data do not indicate that free-living people on self-selected diets including nuts have...increased weight," Dr. Sabate concluded.