Let's say you're trying to lose 20 pounds or boost your immunity or increase your ability to fight COVID or even cancer.

Well, the amazing thing is with the right diet, you are well in your way to achieving these vital health goals.

Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger.

Today, we can finally justify eating nuts with wild abandoned and we'll start with a little known nut called Baru Nuts.

There's a new nut on the market called Baru Almonds, branded as baruchas or just baru nuts.

Technically, it isn't a nut, but a seed that's native to the Brazilian savannah, known as the Sarado,

which is sadly now among the most threatened ecosystems in the world.

For the last 30 years, extensive cattle ranching and feed crop production to fattens said cattle have destroyed much of this ecosystem.

So hey, if we can make it profitable not to cut down the native trees by selling baru nuts, for example, then that could be good for the ecosystem's health, but what about our health?

Although baru nuts are popular and why they consume few studies report on their biological properties.

They do have a lot of polyphenol, phytonutrients, presumably accounting for their high antioxidant activity, and 90% of the phytonutrients are present in the peel.

So are they nutritious? Sure, but do they have any special health benefits?

And not just for the treatment of chubby mice.

Groups fed baru nuts showed lower cholesterol, supposedly indicating that they have a great potential for dietary use in preventing controlling cholesterol problems, but the groups were rats.

And that was compared to LARD.

Basically anything lowers your cholesterol compared to eating LARD.

Nevertheless, there haven't been any reports about the effects of baroam and consumption on human health until this study.

A randomized controlled study of humans found that eating less than an ounce a day for six weeks led to a 9% drop in LDL cholesterol.

20 grams would be about 15 nuts are palmful, like many other nuts studies, even though the research subjects were told to add nuts to their regular diets, there was no weight gain, presumably because nuts are so filling, you inadvertently cut down other foods throughout the day.

How good is a 9.4% drop in LDL?

Well, that's the kind of drop you can get from regular almonds, though macadamias and pistachios may work even better.

But those were at much higher doses, so it appeared 20 grams of baro nuts worked as well as 73 grams of almonds, and so on a per-serving basis or a per-calorie basis, baro nuts really did seem to be special.

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