For all the time we spend thinking about the ideal diet — not to mention consuming it — we know relatively little about the best way to eat. It’s pretty clear that losing weight requires burning more calories than we consume. We know that leaving some nutrients — vitamin C, for example — out of our diet can lead to serious problems. And the evidence increasingly suggests that something other than a standard diet may be better for you. For example, a study last year showed that following a Mediterranean-style diet, which includes lots of fish, some wine, olive oil and vegetables, led to a large reduction in heart disease.
But when it comes to whether specific foods are healthful, we know a lot less. The evidence behind so-called super foods — such as blueberries, broccoli and pomegranates — is pretty flimsy. After all, the kinds of people who eat a lot of blueberries are healthy in other ways, too, so it’s pretty hard to put it all on the berries.
Nuts are one such food that’s gotten a lot of attention. A casual perusal of food-related health articles in the last year would lead you to believe that if you just ate a ton of nuts, you’d live forever. These findings are appealing: Nuts are tasty, and most of us would probably be happy to eat a handful of them every day, especially if they lower mortality risk.
But, as usual, it’s worth asking if these effects are real. Studies of eating nuts are possibly subject to the same issues we have with studies of eating blueberries: The kinds of people who eat nuts are different from everyone else.
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