Eating Pistachios Protects Your Eyes

Eating pistachios can improve your eye health and potentially protect against macular degeneration.

Lutein is an important antioxidant carotene that accumulates in the macula region of the retina where it, remarkably, as macular pigment, acts as a blue light filter that protects your eyes from light damage and oxidative damage. The result is improved visual function and protection from age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in older age.

This study had 33 people who were between 40 and 70 eat a usual diet or the usual diet plus 2 oz (57g) of pistachios for 12 weeks.

By week six, lutein concentrations had significantly increased. Paralleling that increase in lutein, there was a highly significant increase in macular pigment optical density.

Increased macular pigments is important because it has been associated with improved eye health and decreased risk of macular degeneration.

This study introduces the exciting possibility that simply enjoying pistachio nuts in your diet could help promote eye health and prevent macular degeneration.

The Journal of Nutrition. Oct 2024;doi.org/10.1016/j.tjnut.2024.10.022.

 

Niacinamide: New Help for People with Advanced Kidney Disease

For people in kidney failure, it is important to lower serum phosphate levels. But that has proven difficult to do. A natural form of vitamin B3 might help.

High levels of phosphate occur in 72.3% of people with kidney failure who are on hemodialysis. That high level of phosphate is associated with an increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease and, overall, from any cause. So, it is important to get those levels downe.

The main way to do that is to restrict dietary phosphates and prescribe phosphate binding drugs. But even though 90% of people with kidney failure are prescribed phosphate binders, only 50% achieve the recommended phosphate levels.

This new study tried adding niacinamide to the phosphate binder. In the double-blind study, people who were already on phosphate binders added either a placebo or 250mg of niacinamide for 4 weeks and then 500mg for the next 8 weeks.

While phosphate concentrations continued to climb slightly in the placebo group, they went down significantly in the niacinamide group.

This study suggests for the first time that simply adding niacinamide to phosphate binding drugs can safely and significantly reduce serum phosphate concentrations in people on hemodialysis for kidney failure.

Journal of Renal Nutrition. Sep 2024;34(5):454-62.

 

The Evidence Mounts that Nuts Improve Cholesterol

It seems that nuts just can’t beat the rap of their undeserved reputation for being fatty. An important new study tries one more time. Nuts, it confirmed, are good for cholesterol.

Despite a massive body of evidence that nuts are good for protecting you from heart disease, from dying from heart disease and for improving cholesterol, they have had difficulty shaking their bad reputation. Now a comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis of controlled studies has shown, once again, that nuts are effective at actually improving your cholesterol.

The massive study included 113 controlled studies that included 8,060 people. The studies compared the cholesterol effect of an average of 45.5g a day of nuts to eating no nuts.

Eating nuts moderately reduced total cholesterol and the heart harmful LDL cholesterol. It also led to small reductions in triglycerides.

Nuts also reduced apolipoprotein B. Apolipoprotein B carries the bad LDL and VLDL cholesterol to their destinations in your body. It refuses the ride to the good HDL cholesterol. High apolipoprotein B means high levels of heart harmful cholesterol. An Apo B test may be more accurate than a lipid panel testing all the types of cholesterol for determining your risk of cardiovascular disease.

Though nuts did not increase the healthy HDL cholesterol, they did improve the ratio of total cholesterol and bad cholesterol to the good HDL cholesterol.

The strong finding that eating nuts improves apolipoprotein B and that it lowers LDL cholesterol adds, once again, to the evidence that eating nuts has a positive affect on cholesterol.

Nutrition, Metabolism and Cardiovascular Diseases. Oct 2024;doi.org/10.1016/j.numecd.2024.10.009.