Peanut consumption boosts heart health

Including peanuts and nuts in your daily diet provides a simple and inexpensive way to lower your risk of dying from a heart attack, says a study.

"Nuts are rich in nutrients, such as unsaturated fatty acids, fiber, vitamins, phenolic antioxidants, arginine and other phytochemicals," explained senior author Xiao-Ou Shu from Vanderbilt University in the US.

"All of them are known to be beneficial to cardiovascular health, probably through their anti-oxidative, anti-inflammatory and endothelial function maintenance properties," Shu added.

This study was the first to discover that all races - blacks, whites, and Asians alike - could potentially increase heart health by eating nuts and peanuts, the researchers noted.

Because peanuts are much less expensive than tree nuts, as well as more widely available to people of all races and all socioeconomic backgrounds, increasing peanut consumption may provide a potentially cost-efficient approach to improving cardiovascular health, Shu pointed out.

The research was based on three large on-going cohort studies. Participants included over 70,000 people from the Southern Community Cohort Study (SCCS) in the US, and over 130,000 Chinese from the Shanghai Women's Health Study (SWHS) and the Shanghai Men's Health Study (SMHS).

In total, over 14,000 deaths were identified, with a median follow-up of 5.4 years in the SCCS, 6.5 years in the SMHS, and 12.2 years in the SWHS.

Peanut consumption was associated with decreased total mortality, particularly cardiovascular mortality across all three racial/ethnic groups, among both men and women.

The study appeared in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.