New research recommends that eating pistachios can help people with diabetes by reducing the body’s reaction to stress.The investigation, published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, reached that two servings of pistachios in each day “lowered vascular constriction during stress and improved neural control of the heart” in adults with type 2 diabetes. This result comes from a team of scholars at Penn State University, USA, who inspected the effects of pistachios on responses to regular stress tasks in patients having well-controlled type 2 diabetes.
All of the participants were positioned on a typical American diet, which consisted of 36% fat and 12% saturated fats, designed for two weeks, and then randomly allocated to one of two test diets -a standard heart healthy diet (27% fat and 7% saturated fat) and a diet having two daily servings of pistachio nuts (roughly 150 nuts per day). The latter diet was 33% fat and 7% saturated fat. Finally, after finishing this diet period, blood pressure was measured beside participants’ total peripheral vascular resistance when they rest and during two stress tests.
Compared with the low fat, heart healthy diet, the pistachio diet decreased vascular constriction throughout the stress tests. It means, blood vessels stayed more relaxed and open during stress. Beside to blunting the body’s vascular reaction to stress, the pistachio diet as well had positive effects on blood pressure and also heart rate variability – a measure of how properly heart works is controlled by the nervous system.
The scholars clarified that while laboratory measurements of blood pressure were not influenced by pistachios, real-world measures of blood pressure (24-hour ambulatory blood pressure) were considerably lower following the pistachio diet. especially, systolic blood pressure during sleep was decreased by an amount sufficient to decrease workload on the heart. “Although nuts are high in fat, they contain good fats, fibre, potassium and antioxidants,” lead author Sheila G. West said. “Given the high risk of heart disease in people with diabetes, nuts are an important component of a heart healthy diet in this population.”
“If sustained with longer term treatment, these improvements in sleep blood pressure, vascular response to stress and vagal control of the heart could reduce risk of heart disease in this high risk (diabetic) group,” West deduced.
