- Whole, unskinned almonds are just as effective in a weight-loss diet as carbohydrate-based snacks, according to a new study.
- Participants in the study who either ate almonds or carbohydrate-rich snacks lost the same amount of weight.
- However, almonds may also provide some heart-protective cardiometabolic benefits that carbohydrate-rich snacks do not.
A new study from the University of South Australia suggests that a weight-loss diet can be just as effective when you replace carbohydrates with almonds.
Participants in the study, which was funded by the Almond Board of California, lost the same percentage of their body weight, 9.3%, on either an almond-snack or carbohydrate-snack weight-loss diet.
In the study, 106 individuals ranging in age from 25 to 65 years engaged in a three-month energy-reduction diet that reduced their energy/caloric intake by 30%, followed by a six-month weight-maintenance regimen. All had overweight or obesity at the outset of the study.
For snacks, 68 participants consumed 15% of their energy as 30–50 grams of unsalted, whole California almonds with skins — about 27 to 45 almonds. The researchers refer to this diet as the “almond-enriched diet,” or “AED.”
The other 72 individuals followed a nut-free diet (NFD) in which they derived 15% of their calories from carbohydrate-rich snack foods such as oven-baked fruit cereal bars and rice crackers.
At the end of both the three-month weight-loss period and the maintenance period, participants lost weight, gaining a higher percentage of lean mass at the end of the maintenance phase.
By the end of the two phases, both groups exhibited cardiometabolic improvements in fasting glucose, insulin, blood pressure, total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, very low-density lipoprotein, and triglycerides, with an increase in HDL cholesterol.
The authors of the study hypothesize that these improvements are benefits of weight loss.
In addition, the group who snacked on almonds saw an improvement in lipoprotein…
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