Humble peanut appears to offer health benefits of pricier nuts

You don’t have to shell out big bucks to get the health benefits of nuts. The humble peanut—while technically a legume—appears to do just fine in helping to prevent heart disease and in extending life as almonds, walnuts, and other pricier tree nuts, according to a new study published March 2, 2015 in JAMA Internal Medicine. In the international study of more than 200,000 people, scientists found that those who regularly consumed peanuts and other nuts were less likely to have died of any cause — especially heart disease — during the study than those who rarely ate nuts.

“This confirms what we found a few years ago—and our results were greeted with intense skepticism,” Meir Stampfer, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who was not involved in this latest study, said in a March 5, 2015 Harvard Health Blog.

“Botanically, peanuts are not nuts, but nutritionally they are very similar to tree nuts, and other studies have shown their benefits,” Stampfer said.

Lisa Signorello, adjunct associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard Chan, was a co-author of the study.

Read the article: Peanuts linked to same heart, longevity benefits as more pricey nuts

Learn more

Nuts for the Heart

Eating nuts may lengthen lives