A new study published in the journal Circulation found that eating one to two servings (between 30 and 60 grams, or five or ten) of walnuts per day improves the composition of circulating lipoproteins and moderately lowers low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, also known as “bad cholesterol,” in older people.

In addition, people who ate walnuts every day for two years did not gain weight, according to research. The findings not only corroborate three decades of research data that walnuts, which are high in omega-3 fatty acids (alpha-linolenic acid), can help with cardiovascular health, but they also reaffirm the notion that walnuts can be an important part of a heart-healthy dietary pattern.

Emilio Ros, the study’s principal author and former director of the Lipid Clinic of the Hospital Clnic de Barcelona’s Endocrinology and Nutrition Service, ensures that “eating a handful of walnuts every day is a simple way to promote cardiovascular health.”

Walnuts are the only dried fruit that contains a considerable amount of alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), a vegetable omega 3 fatty acid that is vital for health and aids in the maintenance of normal blood cholesterol levels. In this regard, Ros continues, “many people are concerned about gaining weight when eating walnuts because of their fat content, but this fat is beneficial, and our study indicated that the subjects gained no weight at all.”

While small, short-term randomized trials have indicated that nut-supplemented meals have a consistent cholesterol-lowering effect, no long-term trials employing nut-enriched diets to examine targeted lipid changes have been done till now among the elderly, as well as in communities of various geographical origins.

Lower cardiovascular risk

Furthermore, the researchers of this study went beyond LDL cholesterol and analyzed all types of lipoproteins using nuclear magnetic resonance, finding that walnuts improved the quality of lipoproteins, which helps to explain why their consumption is associated with a significant reduction in cardiovascular risk in epidemiological studies.

The findings support a beneficial effect of the walnut diet on lipoprotein subfractions, with reductions in cholesterol of intermediate-density lipoproteins (which contribute to remaining cholesterol, a particularly harmful lipoprotein component) and total LDL particles, as well as Small and dense LDL, which predict the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) independently of LDL-cholesterol.

As a result, the fact that lipid responses were similar in two cohorts with very diverse habitual diets supports the generalizability of the findings of this study.

These findings come from the ‘WAHA’ (‘Walnuts and Healthy Aging’) study, which looked at the effects of walnut-supplemented diets on a variety of health factors in 708 healthy and autonomous elderly adults (average age 69) with normal lipid profiles. The subjects, who were from Barcelona (Spain) and Loma Linda (California, USA), were given either their usual diet without walnuts and other dried fruits (control group) or their usual diet with walnuts (supplement group). 90 percent of participants finished the two-year study, indicating that the intervention was well-received.

Image Credit: Getty

You were reading: Eating between 5 and 10 walnuts a day helps reduce bad cholesterol and control weight