Nuts as a meal may not sound very appealing. But cookbooks are full of recipes that incorporate nuts into pasta dishes and the like. And it would be easy for most of us to add almonds or walnuts to a bowl of cereal or low-fat yogurt at breakfast and occasionally eat a meatless lunch or dinner.
Nuts may help with diabetes, too. The lack of carbohydrate content means nuts don’t add appreciably to the surges in blood sugar we experience after many meals. In fact, they can blunt the effects of carbohydrates on blood sugar levels. Those “postprandial” spikes in blood sugar contribute to the development of diabetes in people vulnerable to getting the disease and must be controlled in those who have already have it. Yet the evidence for nut consumption reducing the risk for developing diabetes is mixed, as are results of studies of the effect it has on blood sugar levels.