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If you get hungry this afternoon, are you going to snack? If you had lunch around noon and dinner isn’t until 7, you’re probably going to have some hunger pangs in the mid-to-late afternoon, so what are you going to eat? A candy bar from the machine? A cookie from your secret stash? There’s a better option. How about some nuts?
A new British study notes that nuts are rich in healthy unsaturated fats, vitamins, minerals, and fiber, but they are calorically dense, so they wouldn’t qualify as a typical “diet” food. Nonetheless, the findings suggest that your afternoon snack should be nuts.
The researchers studied 290,000 British nurses and health professionals over a 20-year period. Every four years they were asked how much they weighed and how often they had eaten a serving (1 ounce) of nuts, including peanut butter. They found that annual weight gain averaged 0.71 lbs. (somewhat less than the average 1 lb. annual weight gain for Americans), but increasing nut consumption was associated with less long-term weight gain.
As little as an increase of half a serving of nuts per day was associated with a lower risk of gaining five lbs. Also, there was a 16 percent lower risk of obesity over any four-year period. Peanut butter didn’t yield the same results. There was no difference associated with peanut butter consumption; only nut consumption was associated with lessening weight gain.
Since the study was observational, we can only conclude that there’s an association between eating nuts and lesser weight gain, but we don’t know definitely if eating nuts was responsible. Also, the results were based on self-reports of a largely white, relatively affluent population, limiting the generalizability of the findings.
Still, the researchers note that their findings were consistent with earlier studies. They suggest that chewing nuts takes effort, and the high fiber content in nuts can delay stomach emptying so that a person may feel full longer after eating nuts. Also, fats in the gut can bind with nut fiber, so more calories are excreted rather than being absorbed.
A personal observation: I had several almond trees on my property when I lived in Chico, one of the almond-growing regions of California, so I frequently have almonds as an afternoon snack. They really do seem to be more filling than other snacks. But regardless of whether it’s almonds, walnuts, pecans, pistachios, Brazil nuts, or peanuts (not really a nut), nuts are a healthy way of dealing with mid-afternoon hunger.
