Peanuts vs Walnuts – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing peanuts to walnuts, we picked the peanuts.
Why?
What heresy is this?!
“But walnuts are more expensive!”, we hear you cry. “They have omega-3s! They look like little brains!”
And, we must confess, all of these things are true. However…
In terms of macros, peanuts have much more protein, and a little more fiber, while walnuts have more fat. And yes, those fats are healthy, and yes, the omega-3 content of walnuts is worth noting. However, while walnuts are higher in total and polyunsaturated fats, peanuts are higher in monounsaturated fats, which are also beneficial. All in all, we’re calling it either a tie on macros, or a win for peanuts, as it really is a lot more protein, and we always consider fiber of top importance.
In the category of vitamins, peanuts have (a lot) more of vitamins B1, B3, B5, B9, E, and choline, while walnuts have a (very) little more of vitamins B2 and B6. So, a clear win for peanuts here, and that’s without considering that in terms of margins of difference, peanuts have 11x the vitamin E, for example.
Looking at minerals, peanuts have more iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while walnuts have more calcium, copper, and manganese. Another clear win for peanuts.
When it comes to polyphenols, peanuts have more diverse polyphenols, while walnuts have a greater total mass of polyphenols. A tie here, or possibly a subjective win for walnuts.
In short, both are great and both have their merits, but by the numbers, and adding up the sections, peanuts take the win today. Still (assuming no allergy), by all means enjoy either or both; diversity is good!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts
Enjoy!
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Brazil Nuts vs Hazelnuts – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing Brazil nuts to hazelnuts, we picked the hazelnuts.
Why?
In terms of macros, Brazil nuts have more fats (including more omega-3, and/but also including more saturated fat) while hazelnuts have more fiber, carbs, and protein. So, which one wins this round is a little subjective; we’d say it’s the fiber for hazelnuts that cinch it, but we could also reasonably declare this round a tie.
In the category of vitamins, Brazil nuts are not higher in any vitamins, while hazelnuts are higher in vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, C, E, K, and choline. And the margins of difference are large in most cases. An easy win for hazelnuts here.
When it comes to minerals, things get interesting: Brazil nuts have more calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, and selenium, while hazelnuts have more iron, manganese, and potassium, but!
Before we crown Brazil nuts with a 4:3 win in this category, though, let’s take a closer look at those selenium levels:
- A cup of hazelnuts contains 13% of the RDA of selenium. Your hair will be luscious and shiny.
- A cup of Brazil nuts contains 10,456% of the RDA of selenium. This is way past the point of selenium toxicity, and your (luscious, shiny) hair will fall out.
For this reason, it’s recommended to eat no more than 3–4 Brazil nuts per day.
We consider that a point against Brazil nuts.
Adding up the sections makes for an overall win for hazelnuts, but by all means enjoy either or both, we just recommend to practise moderation when it comes to the Brazil nuts!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts
Enjoy!
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The Lupus Solution – by Dr. Tiffany Caplan & Dr. Brent Caplan
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Lupus is not fun, and this book sets out to make it easier.
Starting off by explaining the basics of autoimmunity and how lupus works, the authors go on the address the triggers of lupus and how to avoid them—which if you’ve been suffering from lupus for a while, you probably know this part already, but it’s as well to give them a look over just in case you missed something.
The real value of the book though comes in the 8 chapters of the section “Tools & Therapies” which are mostly lifestyle adjustments though there are additionally some pharmaceutical approaches that can also help, and they are explained too. And no, it’s not just “reduce inflammation” (but yes, also that); rather, a whole array of things are examined that often aren’t thought of as related to lupus, but in fact can have a big impact.
The style is to-the-point and informational, and formatted for ease of reading. It doesn’t convey more hard science than necessary, but it does have a fair bibliography at the back.
It’s a short book, weighing in at 182 pages. If you want something more comprehensive, check out our review of The Lupus Encyclopedia, which is 848 pages of information-dense text and diagrams.
Bottom line: if you have lupus and would like fewer symptoms, this book can help you with that quite a bit without getting so technical as the aforementioned encyclopedia.
Click here to check out The Lupus Solution, and live more comfortably!
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Pistachios vs Cashews – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing pistachios to cashews, we picked the pistachios.
Why?
In terms of macros, both are great sources of protein and healthy fats, and considered head-to-head:
- pistachios have slightly more protein, but it’s close
- pistachios have slightly more (health) fat, but it’s close
- cashews have slightly more carbs, but it’s close
- pistachios have a lot more fiber (more than 3x more!)
All in all, both have a good macro balance, but pistachios win easily on account of the fiber, as well as the slight edge for protein and fats.
When it comes to vitamins, pistachios have more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B6, B9, C, & E.
Cashews do have more vitamin B5, also called pantothenic acid, pantothenic literally meaning “from everywhere”. Guess what’s not a common deficiency to have!
So pistachios win easily on vitamins, too.
In the category of minerals, things are more balanced, though cashews have a slight edge. Pistachios have more notably more calcium and potassium, while cashews have notably more selenium, zinc, and magnesium.
Both of these nuts have anti-inflammatory, anti-diabetic, and anti-cancer benefits, often from different phytochemicals, but with similar levels of usefulness.
Taking everything into account, however, one nut comes out in the clear lead, mostly due to its much higher fiber content and better vitamin profile, and that’s the pistachios.
Want to learn more?
Check out:
Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts
Enjoy!
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Why Your Hip Hurts (Each Hip Pain Explained) + What To Do
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Not all hip pain is created equal, which means it’s important to know what’s actually going on in order to know how to fix it:
🎵 If you wanna know why it hurts you so… 🎵
Let’s do a run-down, part by part:
- Front hip pain from hip flexors: pain down the front, worse when lifting your knee. Usually hip flexor strain or tightness; helped by progressive strengthening.
- Front hip pain from hernia: pain at crease of leg, worse with bending, lifting, coughing, or bearing down; bulge present that worsens when standing/coughing and reduces lying down. See a doctor for this one.
- Front hip pain from referred pain: dull, hard-to-pinpoint pain without lump; coughing/sneezing doesn’t worsen it; often referred from lower back or pelvic joints. He (a chiropractor) says to see a chiropractor. We (10almonds, who like evidence-based healthcare) suggest instead to see a physio.
- Hip socket pinching pain: sharp pinch when bending knee past 90°, worse with inward rotation; structures inside hip joint affected. This is usually arthritis in middle age or older, but can be excess bone growth in youth or a labral tear at any age. Remedies vary depending on which, so see a physio to be sure.
- Outer hip pain: pain over bony lump or nearby muscles, common after activity increase, especially in women over 40; often sore to lie on at night. This one’s typically caused by tendonitis of the outer gluteal muscles; you can test it by standing on the painful leg for 30 seconds. Weak glutes are a contributing factor, so strengthening helps. He doesn’t mention this, but we’d also suggest taking care of any chronic inflammation, by adopting an anti-inflammatory diet if you haven’t already.
- Snapping hip: hip snaps/flicks with movement; usually the iliotibial band rubbing over hip. Tension release is what’s needed; see a physio.
- Back of hip pain: deep glute ache, worse with sitting or sport, sore when pressing or stretching. This may well be be piriformis syndrome (tight piriformis muscle compressing the sciatic nerve), which can cause numbness or pins and needles down leg. Physio can help with this, as can well-instructed yoga or Pilates.
- Hip pain from lower back: pain in lower back plus hip, which gets worse with movements like bending, standing, or reaching forward—strengthening glutes will take the strain off it.
- “Sitting bone” pain: pain at bony seat area of the pelvis is often a matter of hamstring tendon strain where it meets the pelvis; progressive hamstring strengthening needed
- If unsure: see a physio, but honestly, 80% of the time the answer is going to be strengthening your glutes.
For more on all of this plus visual illustrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like this book we reviewed a little while back:
11 Minutes to Pain-Free Hips – by Melinda Wright
Take care!
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The Medicinal Properties Of Bay Leaves
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The humble bay leaf has more uses than just culinary!
How about for hair growth?
Popularly recommended on social media with the promise of long and glowing hair… Guess how many scientific studies back up this claim!
If you guessed zero, you guessed correctly. At least, we were not able to find any. In fact, the only paper on the entirety of PubMed (a large online database of available scientific literature from most, if not all, reputable scientific journals) to return a hit for the search string “bay leaf hair growth” was this one:
You may notice that that has nothing to do with hair growth, and rather returned the hit because the acne bacteria are known to “proliferate within sebum-blocked skin hair follicles”.
So let’s talk about that instead:
Against acne & skin inflammation
Well, for that, it works! The research that we mentioned above concluded that:
❝LNE significantly suppressed the expression of P. acnes-mediated proinflammatory cytokines, such as IL-1β, IL-6, and NLRP3. We also found that LNE inhibited the inflammatory transcription factor NF-κB in response to P. acnes. In addition, eucalyptol, which is the main constituent of LNE, consistently inhibited P. acnes-induced inflammatory signaling pathways. Moreover, LNE significantly ameliorated P. acnes-induced inflammation in a mouse model of acne. We suggest for the first time that LNE hold therapeutic value for the improvement of P. acnes-induced skin inflammation.❞
LNE = Laurus nobilis extract, i.e. bay leaf extract
Now, that’s all about acne-induced skin inflammation, but what about other kinds?
Against inflammation in general
Bay leaves have an abundance of antioxidant polyphenols, and what’s good against oxidation is good against inflammation. For example:
Laurus nobilis leaf extract controls inflammation by suppressing NLRP3 inflammasome activation
That anti-inflammatory action is more than skin-deep though, because…
Against IBD / ulcerative colitis
It’s good for the gut, too, for example in this study (with mice, but the bacteria affected are the same as we have), which found:
❝…bay leaves showed the best treatment effects on gut microbiota compositions; promoting the growth of Bifidobacteria and Lactobacillus in addition to producing high butyric acid levels. Meanwhile, the number of Clostridium and sulfate-reducing bacteria was significantly reduced. Conclusively, consuming bay leaves brought significant colon health benefits other than stimulating appetite for a better taste.❞
Note that all of those gut-related changes are beneficial to us, increasing things that are best increased, and reducing things that are best reduced.
Against diabetes
It’s good for the blood—and for the heart, but more on that later. First, about diabetes:
❝All three levels of bay leaves reduced serum glucose with significant decreases ranging from 21 to 26% after 30 d.
Total cholesterol decreased, 20 to 24%, after 30 days with larger decreases in low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol of 32 to 40%. High density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol increased 29 and 20% in the groups receiving 1 and 2 g of bay leaves, respectively. Triglycerides also decreased 34 and 25% in groups consuming 1 and 2 g of bay leaves, respectively, after 30 d. There were no significant changes in the placebo group.
In summary, this study demonstrates that consumption of bay leaves, 1 to 3 g/d for 30 days, decreases risk factors for diabetes and cardiovascular diseases and suggests that bay leaves may be beneficial for people with type 2 diabetes.❞
Again, all those changes are good:
Bay Leaves Improve Glucose and Lipid Profile of People with Type 2 Diabetes
Good for the heart
This one’s quite straight forward. Bay leaf tea is indeed good for the heart,
- Literally: Evaluation of Daily Laurus nobilis Tea Consumption on Lipid Profile Biomarkers in Healthy Volunteers
- Metaphorically: Evaluation of daily Laurus nobilis tea consumption on anxiety and stress biomarkers in healthy volunteers
Of course, even that latter is also good for the heart literally, just, indirectly, by reducing anxiety and stress, thus indirectly benefiting the heart itself.
But even before that, it’s already very directly beneficial to cardiovascular health, per its significant improvements to the lipid profile.
Anything else?
So much else, but there’s only so much we can feature in one day, so if you’d like to learn more, we recommend this very comprehensive paper:
…which discusses many benefits in considerable detail, including…
❝The LN leaves have various biological activities, such as antioxidant, wound healing, antibacterial, analgesic, and anti-inflammatory activities. However, oxidative stress, cancer, diabetes, microbial infections, and inflammatory diseases are closely linked. The objective of this research is to characterize Laurus nobilis (LN) aromatic oil (AO) and evaluate its antioxidant, antidiabetic, antiobesity, antimicrobial, and antimutagenic bioactivities.
The plant AO showed potent antioxidant activity (IC50 = 2.2 ± 1.38) and has moderate anti-amylase (IC50 = 60.25 ± 1.25), anti-glucosidase (IC50 = 131.82 ± 0.1), and antilipase (IC50 = 83.17 ± 0.06) activities.
Moreover, LNAO showed potent antimicrobial activity against Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumonia, Proteus vulgaris (MICs = 1.56 µg/mL), methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) (MIC = 3.125 µg/mL) and Candida albicans (MIC = 0.195 µg/mL). The cytotoxicity results demonstrated that at a concentration of 1 mg/mL, LNAO has potent breast cancer (MCF-7), and hepatocellular carcinoma (Hep 3B) cancer cells inhibitory activities of 98% and 95%, respectively.
Importantly, we are the first to show that LNAO significantly hinders hepatocellular carcinoma spheroids’ formation capacity in a 3D model.
These results show that LNAO is a promising natural source with powerful antioxidant, antidiabetic, anticancer, and antimicrobial activities that could be exploited in the future to treat a variety of diseases.❞
Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, but you can buy leaves from your local supermarket and make bay leaf tea, or alternatively, if you prefer essential oil form, here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎
Enjoy!
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Healthy Eating, With Rural Food Availabilities
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
No question/request too big or small 😎
❝Informtation about healthy food that doesn’t need obscure ingredients, things we can’t get in rural areas❞
Great suggestion, as we do have many readers who (like yourself, presumably) live in such places!
Generally speaking, what we try to do is give the most universally applicable health information possible, and trust people to apply that in the context of what’s available to them.
One of the reasons it’s hard to tailor dietary information to exclude “obscure” ingredients is that “obscure” is relative and subjective. Sometimes, one reader’s “what is this weird food I’ve never heard of?” is another reader’s everpresent staple!
So, while we can’t whip up a menu based on the products available in your local store without having an inventory of your local store, what we can do is offer some guiding principles:
Do what you can
It’s tempting to be sad that certain things aren’t locally available. This writer has a friend who often sends recipes that call for locally unavailable specific Middle Eastern and/or Surinamese* ingredients, and yes, it’s unfortunate.
*Which this writing software thinks is so obscure it did not even recognize the word “Surinamese” and highlighted it as a spelling mistake.
However, it’s best to focus on what is available, and work with that where possible.
Substitute or skip?
Sometimes, if you can’t get something fresh, canned or frozen or dried is fine. Sometimes it isn’t (in culinary terms, anyway; it’s almost always fine in nutrition terms, unless it’s lettuce or something in which case yes, only fresh will do).
Experiment, find out what works and what doesn’t. In the worst case scenario, you’ll have a disappointing meal once and not repeat that one.
Sometimes, the “inferior” choices work better! See for example: Super-Nutritious Shchi ← in this one, those dried herbs? They work better than fresh. The fresh herbs would give it a slightly sweeter taste that’s not appropriate here. And guess what, the Russian peasants who invented this dish did not have fresh rosemary and thyme (which grow nicely in a Mediterranean climate, and not so well in Siberia, say). Those tomatoes? We use fresh in the recipe there and it’s fine, but actually canned cherry tomatoes work great too.
On which note…
People think of “canned foods” as meaning “processed foods” and therefore bad. But the reality is it’s all dependent on what’s in the can (check the ingredients!). And as for nutrients?
Many canned fruits and vegetables contain more nutrients than fresh ones! This is because the way they’ve been stored preserves them better. For example:
- Canned tomatoes contain more bioavailable lycopene than fresh
- Canned spinach contains more bioavailable carotene than fresh
- Canned corn contains more bioavailable lutein than fresh
- The list goes on, but you get the idea!
Learn more: Nutrient Retention During Canned Food Production
Count the plant types
Getting at least 30 different types of plant in your diet each week is associated with much better health outcomes than not doing that.
It is not, in fact, a number out of a hat. It’s from a big (n=11,336) study into what things affect the gut microbiome for better or for worse. It was an observational population study, championing “citizen science” in which volunteers tracked various things and collected and sent in various samples for analysis.
The most significant finding of this study was that those who consumed more than 30 different kinds of plants per week, had a much better gut microbiome than those who consumed fewer than 10 different kinds of plants per week (there is a bell curve at play, and it gets steep around 10 and 30):
American Gut: an Open Platform for Citizen Science Microbiome Research
You can read more about it, here: What’s Your Plant Diversity Score?
Does it sound hard to get in 30 different plants, without good local availability?
In this writer’s pantry alone (so, only shelf-stable goods), there are (by coincidence, literally just counted them now) precisely 30 different kinds of plants, mostly in the form of various canned, jarred/fermented, or dried goods.
And that’s without counting herbs and spices (which would add another 21 to the tally).
Now, your local availability will differ from this writer’s, but we’re willing to bet that your local stores have a lot of different canned, jarred/fermented, or dried goods.
It’s easy to forget a lot of them are plants, if you’re only thinking of greenery and such. For example, nuts are plants! Canned beans/pulses are plants! Lentils are plants! Grains are plants! And so forth.
Minimize the bad
We generally advocate for focusing on adding healthy things more than eliminating unhealthy things, and we stand by that as a generally more useful principle, and certainly one that’s a lot easier to act on (and after all, dietary information is only useful if you actually implement it).
That said, there’s a strong case to be made for skipping alcohol, reducing sugar and salt, things like that. And those tweaks are usually things that one can do almost anywhere.
Keep your menu fresh, even if the ingredients aren’t
Variety’s important psychologically, not just nutritionally, and at the end of the day you’ll probably only do what doesn’t feel like a terrible chore.
So, with that in mind…
Enjoy!
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