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About Video - ARE NUTS FATTENING? WHAT ABOUT NUT BUTTERS?
Konnichewah, GojiMan here! In today’s video I am going to be looking at whether nuts are fattening. This is a question I get a lot, so I thought I would address it here!
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Studies cited in video:
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18042516
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21216574
- https://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v26/n8/pdf/0802050a.pdf?foxtrotcallback=true
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20199999
- http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/86/1/206.full.pdf+html
- http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/88/4/922.full.pdf+html
We all know that nuts are packed with nutrition. But they are also packed with calories. So if someone eats a lot of nuts will they pack on the pounds? So if we look at some fairly recent studies from 2007 of over 20 clinical trials, the results were quite surprising considering the amount of their calories which were coming from nuts.
What the studies actually showed was that people were either putting on dramatically less weight than was predicted, they were gaining no weight at all or in some cases people were actually losing weight. However these studies were fairly limited in nature as they were clinical trials that only lasted a couple of weeks or months at most.
So scientists then thought, well clearly nuts don’t lead to short term weight gain, but what about for those who consumed high amounts of nuts over many years? And again the results were fairly surprising.
We have 6 large studies over the course of 8 years that provides very good insights. One of these studies showed absolutely no change in the participants and the other 5 studies showed significantly less weight gain and abdominal visceral fat in all subjects who were eating higher quantities of nuts.
Another really interesting study from 2012 looked at people who added over 100 pistachios to their daily diets for 3 months. And again nobody in that study gained any weight. And this result is very interesting from the outside because these people consumed an additional 30,000 calories over the course of the trial and still no weight gain was observed. So why was this happening?
It baffled scientists for a while. These missing calories were going completely going against the laws of thermodynamics. Calories can just disappear in the body.
So there are two main reasons that this happens and enables us to eat nuts without gaining weight. The first reason is fecal excretion. Lovely hey! What happens is that the cell walls of nuts remain intact despite us chewing them. So the net consequence of this is that they remain intact in the digestive tract as the body can’t break them down enough, and your body doesn’t absorb them at a high rate. So despite being high in calories, we simply just don’t absorb the totality of the nut.
So this is all very well with whole nuts, but many people eat a lot of nuts in the form of nut butters. The nuts and cell walls are then heavily broken down, so would this affect weight gain? Again, this has been put to the test in a study in 2010. In the study they divided the people into 2 groups. The first group they gave have half a cup of whole peanuts and the 2nd group they gave the same amount of peanuts but in the form of peanut butter. Then after a month they analysed the results.
The theory behind the study was that because the nut cell walls were broken down in the second group, they should experience a certain amount of weight gain because the body would absorb more of the calories. In reality, this is not what was observed. Just like the 1st group eating whole nuts, no weight-gain was observed in any of the participants. So if faecal excretion wasn’t at play with nut butters then there must be another reason why the calories weren’t being absorbed in the body.
Again, we were given the answers from another 2010 study. Essentially the participants we again split into 2 groups. The first group were given a fruit smoothie for breakfast and the 2nd group were given the same smoothie but with the addition of blended nuts. Neither group was told what was contained in the smoothies.
Then the scientists allowed both groups to consume whatever they wanted throughout the day and recorded all the details. What happened next was really cool. Those who consumed the smoothies without nuts ate considerably more calories throughout the day than those whose smoothie contained the nuts.
And the reason behind this is despite more calories being absorbed from nut butters, nuts are actually very satiating and appetite suppressing. So despite the 2nd group consuming more calories for breakfast, the appetite suppressing characteristics of nuts were actually helping people to eat significantly fewer calories during the day.
Thanks for watching, I will see you tomorrow!
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