Several months back, I wrote about the pistachio and how it had been overshadowed by other nuts like the peanut. The stated goal of the article was to bring more attention to the pistachio and to the fact that it was a nut that carried a host of benefits to the body when eaten as part of a healthy diet. One of the ways the pistachio benefits the body is by lowering cholesterol levels, something a Penn State study discovered which I made mention of in my article “King Peanut? Pish Tosh!” It’s this study that I’d like to elaborate on.

In this study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers had three groups of participants follow one of three diets plans for four weeks, all of them variations of the Step I Diet. This diet was created back in 2000 – and endorsed by the American Heart Association – for those with high cholesterol levels. Step I dieters were to follow a strict meal plan, which required eating no more than 300 mg of cholesterol per day (for the sake of comparison, one egg yolk contains about 215mg) and to get no more than 30 percent of total calories from fat. Once cholesterol levels began to lessen, it’s upward and onward to the next ‘step’ – Step II – and consuming a little bit less (less than 200 mg of cholesterol per day) until cholesterol levels got back to normal.

With each diet plan eating virtually the same thing, the biggest difference was with respect to their pistachio consumption and fat tolerance. One of the groups ate no pistachios at all, but the other two were pistachio-infused. One of the groups had 10 percent of their allotted 30 percent fat calories coming from pistachios. The other group’s diet had 20 percent of their allotted 34 percent of fat calories coming from the pistachio (notice the 34 percent to 30 percent total fat calorie difference). The diet with no pistachios was the most restrictive in terms of fat – 25 percent of calories coming from fat.

What the researchers found will forever flummox the ‘all fat is bad’ crowd. Why? Because this line of thinking believes the more fat consumed, the worse off someone is in terms of bad cholesterol.

Au contraire.

Because according to the researchers’ findings, the dieters who got 10 percent of their fat calories form pistachios lowered their LDL cholesterol levels by 9 percent compared to the no pistachio group. And the 20 percenters? They lowered their LDL cholesterol levels even more – by 12 percent! And remember: the pistachio groups’ diets included more fat than the control group.

I’m sure this study won’t convince those who hate pistachios to start eating them, but at the very least, this study shows that those who eat less fat isn’t necessarily a recipe for a healthy heart. It’s all in the kinds of fat eaten and the quality of the food that’s being consumed. And as this study has shown, there are few more quality fats than the unsaturated kind found in pistachios.