Nuts to you. Yes, you.

Remember when chocolate was supposed to make your face break out, margarine was much healthier than butter, eggs were too high in cholesterol to eat more than once a week, milk was for “every body,” …and nuts were super-salty, super-fattening munchies to be avoided?

Oh so yesterday.

(Dark) chocolate has potent anti-aging and mood-enhancing qualities.  (Proof, right there, of the existence of God/dess.) Butter trumps margarine. Eggs are nutrition powerhouses.  Milk is not, in fact, for every body. (Far more people are lactose intolerant than gluten intolerant.)

And nuts. Wow. Nuts are in the midst of a major image make-over.

Old news that food can be potent (anti-aging) medicine. Hippocrates wrote, Let food be your medicine, and your medicine be food about 2400 years before the invention of Krunchy Kale. But evidence that any particular food has a particular health and anti-aging effect has been hard to come by. Not that everyone-and-his-uncle (as my father used to say) hasn’t claimed the miraculous powers of one “superfood” or another.

The problem with research about a particular food – the heart-healthy effects of salmon, the anti-inflammatory power of blueberries – is that people who tend to eat these foods are the very people who tend to make other healthy decisions in their lives. It is thus quite challenging to tease out the effects of the singular behavior of eating a single food.

But now there’s new (better) research on nuts that is beginning to make a strong and believable case for their particular health benefits.  This randomized study – it randomly assigned some people (who may or may not practice other healthy behaviors) to eat nuts and others (who also may or may not have healthy habits) not to eat nuts — lessened the chance for nut-eating benefits to be conflated with other healthy behaviors. That study – a handful of nuts a day for the lucky who were chosen – found that consumption of nuts lowered bad cholesterol and triglycerides, and boosted good cholesterol. (This, presumably, would lead to better cardiovascular health, fewer heart attacks and strokes.)

In a large (almost 120,000 men and women) – but, alas, not randomized – study of nut-eaters published in the New England Journal of Medicine last year, greater nut consumption correlated with a decrease in mortality. (During the study, that is, as nut-eaters and non-nut-eaters both have a 100% chance of dying.) Again, the problem with the data was the overall health and broader healthy habits of nut-eaters. So actually, the take home message of that study was that nut-eaters turned out to be thinner, to exercise more, to eat more fruits and vegetables, and to smoke less than the nut-less.

So, yay for nuts.  Or modified yay. Nuts are “nutritionally dense” — but that’s a nice way of saying high-cal. That “handful” of almonds? Figure 200-300 calories depending on the size of your hand.  (And figure 30 seconds to consume.)  So, health benefits aside, it’s not like you want to be going back for that second handful. But certainly nuts (particularly almonds and walnuts) belong on the YES list along with dark chocolate. In fact, together!