Believe It Or Nut, There’s Nutting To Worry About With Almonds And Weight Loss

There’s good news for nut lovers, especially almond aficionados, recent research published in Obesity shows that you can eat almonds and still lose weight. The study found that including almonds in an energy-restricted diet not only helped people to lose weight but also helped to improve their cardiometabolic health. 

The study was designed to examine the effects of energy-restricted diets supplemented with almonds or with carbohydrate-rich snacks, and researchers found that both diets successfully reduced body weight by about 7kg.

For this study, 106 participants completed a 9-month eating program: 3 months of an energy-restricted diet for weight loss, followed by a 6-month energy-control diet for weight maintenance. During both phases of the eating program, 15% of the participants’ energy intake consisted of unsalted whole almonds with skins for the nut diet or 15% carbohydrate-rich snacks like rice crackers or baked cereal bars for the nut-free diet. 

"Nuts, like almonds, are a great snack. They're high in protein, fibre, and packed with vitamins and minerals, but they also have a high-fat content which people can associate with increased body weight," said UniSA researcher Dr. Sharayah Carter. "Additionally, nuts have the added benefit of making you feel fuller for longer, which is always a pro when you're trying to manage your weight."  The key is moderation. 

"In this study, we examined the effects of an almond-supplemented diet with a nut-free diet to identify any influence on weight and cardiometabolic outcomes,” said Carter. "Both the nut and nut-free diets resulted in approximately 9.3% reduction in body weight over the trial.”

"Yet the almond-supplemented diets also demonstrated statistically significant changes in some highly atherogenic lipoprotein subfractions, which may lead to improved cardiometabolic health in the longer term.”

Based on their findings the researchers concluded that this study provides further evidence that almonds can be recommended as part of a balanced weight loss diet.