Almonds Can Help Reduce Belly Fat

As long as you're on a heart-healthy diet, snacking on an ounce and a half of almonds (instead of a banana muffin) can lower your total and LDL ("bad") cholesterol and pare belly fat, which itself is a risk factor for heart disease. For a 12-week study at Penn State, researchers recruited 52 overweight, middle-aged adults. The participants were healthy apart from having high cholesterol, and they were all asked to eat the same diet, the only difference being a daily snack: either 1.5 ounces of almonds or a banana muffin. The calorie content of the almonds and the muffin was the same. The researchers provided the volunteers with all the meals and snacks they would need in amounts calculated to maintain their body weight over a period of six weeks. Although the diet including almonds didn't affect the weight of the study volunteers, it did reduce abdominal fat mass, waist circumference and leg fat mass compared to the participants with the muffin in their diet