What Eating Walnuts Does to Your Risk of Dying (The Evidence Is Hard to Ignore)

The first thing to talk about is where that 14% figure actually comes from because the study behind it is a really big one and it is really worth spending some time to go through this properly.

So it used two long-running American research projects.

The first one was the Nurses' Health Study and also the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study and you can read these in the description below.

There were 67,000 women and 26,000 men, so a bit over 90,000 people in total.

And all of them were free from cancer and heart disease and strokes when they joined.

So these were fairly healthy people.

Their diets were reassessed every four years rather than just asked about once and then forgotten, which is a real strength for a study like this.

And the researchers also recorded who died over the following two decades and what they died of.

And in a group of this size, almost 100,000 people, made up largely of people already in their 60s at the start of the study, you would expect a great many deaths simply from age and ordinary illness over the 20 years.

And that is what happened with just over 30,000 deaths recorded from all of the usual causes.

So the point I'm making is that these people didn't die because they ate walnuts.

Obviously, I'm not saying that.

When the researchers then lined people up by how many walnuts they were eating, and the serving here means around 28 grams, so like an ounce or roughly seven whole walnuts, the pattern moved in pretty clear steps.

Compared with people who ate zero walnuts, so literally none at all, those having less than one serving a week had around 5% lower death rates.

One serving a week had about 6%, two to four servings around 13% lower, and five or more servings around 14%.

Deaths from heart disease and stroke were down by roughly a quarter in that top group.

It is enormous.

And when they modeled this out, a 60-year-old eating walnuts that often could expect around 1.3 extra years of life.

Now, it is completely fair to say that somebody eating walnuts five times a week is probably doing other healthy things alongside it.

Of course they are.

And of course, it will be playing a big part in the findings here.

But the thing is, walnuts really do carry a long list of good things in their own right, which we're going to come on to.

So this may well be more than just healthy people eating.

being healthy, if that makes sense.