How We Got There
To research nuts, we turned to the Tufts
University Nutrition Navigator (see Links).
A Search for Nuts returned 14 potential sources. With one exception
these all fell short of reliability (as, "this author seems
to have good intentions, but preliminary research is presented as
blanket recommendations . . .")
The exception was the HealthGate entry.
We selected the site and were rewarded by a description of HealthGate by
the Tufts people. They judged accuracy at 9 out of 10, usability 4 out
of 5. Overall rating was 22 out of 25, "Among the Best." This
sounded good to us, and we went for it.
What We Found
So we clicked the HealthGate link and came
to their site http://www3.healthgate.com.
Here we searched for nuts again. The most relevant article for us seemed
to be "Go ahead, go nuts!" by Jennifer Pitzi Heilwig, MS, RD.
This proved to be a readable, and confidently
authoritative, summary, and seems to us about all anyone would need to
go ahead with his or her personal nut program. Read it, and enjoy with
the blessing of science.
Are All Nuts Equal?
A nagging question does remain: Are some
nuts much less healthy than others? Heilwig cites the early hypothesis
that benefits come from the "high content of polyunsaturated fatty
acids relative to saturated fatty acids in nuts."
Her table shows that this ratio is a high of
11/2 for walnuts, but descends to an actual fraction for cashews at 2/3.
(God, I hope there's more to it than that; cashews are my favorites.)
Let us know if you can shed any light on this
matter.
