On Thursday 11th June (2015), we woke up to the headline “Nuts protect against early death”. The headlines came from a study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology. Professor Piet van den Brandt was the lead author.
Quite specifically the promise being made to the world was that “half a handful of nuts” would result in a “23% lower chance of death...”
Before we get into this nonsense, if you have any nuts and a weighing scale to hand, please try to weigh out 0-5 grams and 5-10 grams of nuts – as these are two of the four groups (quartiles) into which consumption was allocated. The lowest group was no nuts consumed at all and the highest group was 10 grams or over. These are all in daily intakes.
