Why Pistachios May Be Nuts For Your Gut

By Deborah Mitchell on April 27, 2012 - 12:59pm for eMaxHealth


A healthy gut (gastrointestional) environment is essential for good health, and pistachios might just be the nuts for the job. Here’s what the authors of a new study have discovered about why pistachios may be nuts for your gut.

What’s special about pistachios?

If you like pistachios, you already know what’s special about these nuts for you. Besides tasting good, you may also know that one ounce of pistachios (49 kernels) provides 160 calories, 3 grams of fiber, 6 grams of protein, 6.8 grams of healthy fat (monounsaturated), and about 18% of your daily requirement for vitamin B6, copper, and manganese.

Pistachios are not only good food for you to eat, however; they also serve as a meal for the beneficial bacteria that live in your gut. In this latter role, the fiber and phytochemicals in pistachios stay in the gut and are used by the bacteria for growth and to modify the gut environment.

According to Volker Mai, PhD, the lead author of the new study and assistant professor at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, this is great news for the gut. “Modifying microbiota [gut microbial environment] towards a ‘beneficial’ composition is a promising approach for supporting intestinal health, with potential effects on overall health, and it appears that pistachios may play a role in this modification.”

Here’s why he made this claim. Mai and his team enrolled 16 healthy individuals in a study in which they were randomly assigned to eat an American-style, pre-planned diet that included either 0, 1.5, or 3 ounces of pistachios or almonds daily. (The calories were adjusted to avoid weight loss or gain.)

Throughout the study, the researchers collected and analyzed stool samples of the participants to identify the bacteria. Specifically, they looked for two groups of bacteria that help break down food, so-called “beneficial bacteria”—lactic acid bacteria and Bifidobacteria.

After 19 days of the study, the authors observed the following:

• Volunteers who ate up to 3 ounces of pistachios daily had higher levels of various bacteria in the gut.
• Pistachio eaters also had an increase in potentially beneficial bacteria that produce butyrates, which are important as food for cells that line the colon and so play an important role in maintaining intestinal health.
• The difference in gut microbes was stronger in people who ate pistachios compared with those who ate almonds
• Although both almonds and pistachios improved the gut environment, pistachios provided more benefit.

Studies of pistachios

A number of studies have uncovered health benefits associated with eating pistachios. For example:

• A University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center study reported that a diet containing pistachios may help reduce the risk of lung cancer
• A Turkish study found that pistachio intake significantly reduced triglyceride levels while increasing antioxidant activity
• A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition revealed that daily consumption of pistachios was associated with improved cholesterol levels
• Pistachios have also been credited with helping lower “bad” low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol

In this latest study, which was presented at the 2012 Experimental Biology meeting, the authors concluded that although their work is preliminary, it is “a promising sign that increasing consumption of nuts, specifically pistachios, provides a novel means to modify the number of the gut’s ‘healthy’ microbiota, with potential health benefits.”

And that’s why pistachios may be the nuts for your gut.

SOURCES:
Alturfan AA et al. Consumption of pistachio nuts beneficially affected blood lipis and total antioxidant activity in rats fed a high-cholesterol diet. Folia Biol Praha 2009; 55(4): 132-36
Gebauer SK et al. Effects of pistachios on cardiovascular disease risk factors and potential mechanisms of action: a dose-response study. Am J Clin Nutr 2008 Sep; 88(3): 651-59
Ukhanova M et al. Human gut microbiota changes after consumption of almonds or pistachios. Presented at 2012 Experimental Biology meeting in San Diego, April 23, 2012

Image: Wikimedia Commons

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Go Nuts with Healthful Pistachios

Attention snackers! Are you longing for some good news? One of our favorite healthy snack foods—pistachios—has fewer calories than we thought. Not by an enormous amount, mind you, but enough to afford us a moment or two of guiltless snacking.

For 100 years or so, the caloric value of foods has been calculated using something called the Atwater general factor system. You may not have heard of it by name, but you probably have heard its long-standing pronouncement that proteins and carbohydrates have four calories per gram and fat has nine calories per gram. Of course, many things aren’t as simple as they seem. And it turns out that not all fat is equal when it comes to counting calories.

A FIRST-OF-ITS-KIND STUDY

Recent clinical studies had indicated that the fat in pistachio nuts is not well-absorbed by the body, but there hadn’t been a human study to prove it... until now. The US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service recently released the results of a meticulous study tracing the fate of pistachios in the human body. They found that about 6% of their fat calories pass right through us without being absorbed—meaning that pistachios effectively have fewer calories than we had thought.

For details about the study, our editors turned to David Baer, PhD, supervisory research physiologist with the Agricultural Research Service and the study’s lead author, who explained that the purpose of the study was to determine the legitimate calorie value of pistachios in an otherwise balanced diet. He gave us a very “inside” account of their research.

In the study, 16 healthy, nonsmoking men and woman, ages 29 to 64, all without gastrointestinal disorders, ate a consistent balanced diet of typical American food for three weeks. They ate all the food, and only the food, prepared for them by the research center. The participants were weighed each morning and their intake adjusted to keep their weight stable.

While all of this was going on, researchers gave each participant one of three different “doses” of pistachios to eat—0 grams (the control), 42 grams (about one and one-half ounces) and 84 grams (about three ounces) per day—as part of their diet. For the two pistachio diets, which resulted in increased daily intakes of fat and dietary fiber compared with the control, total carbohydrates were reduced—so that total calorie consumption remained at the level where subjects neither gained nor lost weight.

CALORIES IN—CALORIES OUT

Everything the participants ate was carefully weighed and chemically analyzed before it went in... and everything was just as carefully analyzed when it came out so that researchers could track the absorption of fat and nutrients in the body. Ingeniously, researchers gave participants a brilliant blue “marker capsule” by mouth to help them identify the beginning and end of the study. Once the blue was out of the body, researchers could be sure there was no more food coming out that should be monitored.

Because the weight, amount of fat and energy (calories) increased in the “end product” when pistachios were added to the diet, researchers concluded that less fat had been digested by the body, which meant that fewer calories than expected had been provided by the pistachios.

In addition, because the researchers found that the amount of dietary fiber consumed increased with the addition of pistachios, the fiber calories of the pistachios were also subtracted from the carbohydrate calorie count, further contributing to a lower calorie count.

In the end, the study found the actual measure of calories for pistachios is about 160 for a typical 30-gram serving (approximately 50 nut meats), instead of the generally accepted 170 calories, making it a nut with one of the lowest calorie counts.

While the study isn’t suggesting that we start to think of pistachios as a diet food, every little bit counts when it comes to calorie counting. Plus, although not planned as part of the study, blood samples analyzed after each protocol found that both amounts of pistachio nuts lowered LDL (bad) cholesterol by 6%.

Next up on the Agricultural Research Service’s nut-calorie-authentication research plan are almonds. We may get more good news.

//highenergyforlife.com