Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast

episodes to help you improve your health.

Today we're discussing nuts. If you've heard that nuts are bad for you because they're full of fat,

then you're in for a surprise. Professor Sarah Berry has led large-scale human studies to

uncover how nuts affect our health.

And she's here to tell us the healthiest ways to incorporate them into your diet.

But first, a discovery that will help when you're reading the nutrition information on the back of a nut packet.

Appearances can be deceiving.

I think the elephant in the room is really weight if nuts are high in calories

won't they contribute to weight gain so this is why I think it gets really

interesting and obviously I'm biased because this has been the focus of my research with nuts which is their food matrix.

So what makes the humble nut even more special is their structure and this is what I call the food matrix.

Could you explain a bit more what the food matrix is?

Yeah so we're not talking about Kiana Reeves here, Jonathan.

We're talking about the food structure and really simply put it just

refers to the structure of a food. So I think a really good way to illustrate this is

using almonds and let's say you had a packet of whole almonds and a packet of

ground almonds according to the back-of-pack labeling information they're

nutritionally identical but actually how they behave in our body is really different.

Nuts consist of millions of tiny cells and these have cell walls which we've already mentioned is the fiber

and they have a really important structural role and within these cell walls are tiny fat globules.

Now if I very, very finely grind the nuts, I break down the cell walls and the fat bursts out.

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