Hazelnuts - Beneficial Foods

The hazelnut is one of the oldest foods in the European diet and one of the most misunderstood. Most people meet it first as a flavour — the brown swirl in a jar of chocolate spread, the syrup pump at a coffee counter, the paste inside a boxed confection. Very few meet it as what it actually is: a small, dense, cream-coloured kernel that supplies a full day's vitamin E in a single generous handful, carries more folate than any other common tree nut, and stores its fat in almost exactly the same chemical form as olive oil. This page is about the nut, not the flavouring.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction and History
  2. Nutritional Profile
  3. Vitamin E and the Alpha-Tocopherol Advantage
  4. Folate: Highest of the Tree Nuts
  5. Oleic Acid: A Nut That Eats Like Olive Oil
  6. Manganese, Copper and the Trace-Mineral Load
  7. The Skin: Where the Polyphenols Live
  8. What the Human Trials Show
  9. Whole Hazelnuts Versus Confectionery Spreads
  10. Varieties and Where They Grow
  11. Choosing, Storing and Preparing
  12. How Much to Eat
  13. Who Should Be Careful
  14. Connections
  15. References & Research
  16. Featured Videos

Introduction and History

The hazelnut comes from Corylus avellana, the common hazel, a multi-stemmed shrub or small tree in the birch family that grows wild from Ireland and Portugal across Europe to the Caucasus and northern Anatolia. Two close relatives contribute to the commercial crop and to the confusion over names: Corylus maxima, the filbert, whose husk closes over the nut in a long beak, and Corylus colurna, the Turkish tree hazel, used as a rootstock. In North America the native species are Corylus americana and Corylus cornuta, both edible but small-kernelled and never grown at scale for food.

People in northern Europe were eating hazelnuts in industrial quantities before they were farming anything at all. The best-documented site is Staosnaig on the small Hebridean island of Colonsay, off the west coast of Scotland, where excavators found a shallow pit packed with the charred shell fragments of what has been estimated at hundreds of thousands of hazelnuts, radiocarbon-dated to roughly nine thousand years ago. The scale of the deposit implies something closer to a processing site than a snack: nuts gathered in bulk from a managed stand, roasted to loosen the shells and improve keeping quality, and stored. Hazel shells turn up in Mesolithic layers all over northwest Europe, and hazel pollen surges in the sediment record just after the last glaciation — the “hazel maximum” of the pollen diagrams — spreading faster than a wind-pollinated shrub reasonably should. A number of palaeobotanists suspect human hands in that speed.

The nut kept its importance through the classical world. Theophrastus described the hazel in the fourth century BC, and Pliny the Elder called the cultivated nut nux Avellana after Avella in Campania, whose surrounding hills still grow hazels — a Roman place-name that became the species epithet botanists use today. The English word filbert has a different origin: the feast of Saint Philibert falls on 22 August, about when the nuts ripen in southern England, and the harvest inherited the saint's name.

Hazel mattered for its wood as much as its fruit. Cut to the ground on a cycle of seven to ten years — coppiced — a hazel stool throws up dozens of straight, flexible poles, and those poles built much of pre-industrial rural Europe: wattle panels, sheep hurdles, thatching spars, basket frames. A hazel coppice therefore had two harvests, which is probably why the plant occupies so much space in northern European folklore — the nine hazels over the Well of Segais that feed the Irish Salmon of Knowledge, and the forked hazel rod of the water diviner.

Today the geography of production is startlingly concentrated. Roughly two-thirds of the world's hazelnuts grow on the steep, wet, mild slopes above the Black Sea in northern Türkiye — the provinces of Ordu, Giresun and Trabzon — on smallholdings often measured in fractions of a hectare and harvested by hand. Italy, mostly Piedmont and Campania, is a distant second. The United States contributes a few percent, essentially all of it from the Willamette Valley of Oregon, whose cool damp winters suit a plant that flowers in January. Azerbaijan, Georgia, Chile and Spain make up most of the remainder. When a global crop is that concentrated, a single spring frost on one coastline moves the world price, which is exactly what happens every few years. Hazel is wind-pollinated and self-incompatible, so orchards need interplanted pollenizer varieties; odder still, pollination happens in midwinter but fertilization is delayed until late spring. The nut you eat in autumn was set in motion by a February wind.

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Nutritional Profile

Hazelnuts are a high-fat, low-carbohydrate, mineral-dense food. The figures below are for raw kernels, per 100 grams — about 100 nuts, or three and a half ounces, which is considerably more than anyone eats at a sitting. Percentages are of the standard adult Daily Value used on nutrition labels.

Macronutrients per 100 g

Vitamins per 100 g

Minerals per 100 g

A realistic serving: one ounce, 28 grams, about 21 kernels

Two things stand out from those numbers. The first is that a single ordinary handful delivers three quarters of a day's manganese and half a day's copper — a level of trace-mineral density that very few whole foods reach. The second is that the fat is overwhelmingly monounsaturated, and that the saturated fraction is small in both absolute and relative terms. Hazelnuts also carry roughly 2.2 g of the amino acid arginine per 100 g, and around 100 mg of plant sterols — mostly beta-sitosterol — which compete with cholesterol for absorption in the gut.

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Vitamin E and the Alpha-Tocopherol Advantage

Hazelnuts are one of the very best whole-food sources of vitamin E, and the reason is subtler than the raw milligram count. Vitamin E is not one molecule but a family of eight: four tocopherols and four tocotrienols, designated alpha, beta, gamma and delta. Only alpha-tocopherol meets the human requirement in any practical sense, because the liver protein that rescues vitamin E from degradation and loads it onto circulating lipoproteins — alpha-tocopherol transfer protein — strongly prefers the alpha form. Gamma-tocopherol is absorbed but then largely metabolised and excreted. It has its own biology, but it does not raise your serum vitamin E.

This is where nuts differ from one another in a way the labels do not show. In walnuts, vitamin E is almost entirely gamma-tocopherol, so a walnut is a poor alpha-tocopherol food despite the impressive total. Pistachios are also gamma-dominant. In hazelnuts, alpha-tocopherol makes up the great majority of the tocopherol content. Only almonds beat hazelnuts on alpha-tocopherol per gram among the common nuts, and hazelnuts are not far behind.

That distinction has been tested directly rather than assumed. A pre-post intervention study at Oregon State University fed healthy older adults a daily hazelnut portion for sixteen weeks and measured vitamin E status before and after. Serum alpha-tocopherol rose, the gamma-tocopherol-to-alpha ratio shifted in the expected direction, and magnesium status improved as well. Older adults are a sensible population to test, because dietary vitamin E intakes below the recommended level are extremely common past sixty and the fat-soluble vitamins depend on a fat-containing meal for absorption — a problem a nut solves automatically, since it arrives with its own fat.

The practical point is that vitamin E from hazelnuts comes packaged the way the body expects: the alpha form, in a lipid matrix, alongside the polyunsaturated fatty acids it exists to protect. That is a different proposition from a high-dose isolated alpha-tocopherol capsule, and the large trials of isolated high-dose vitamin E supplements have generally been disappointing. Food and supplement are not interchangeable here.

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Folate: Highest of the Tree Nuts

At about 113 micrograms of dietary folate equivalents per 100 grams, hazelnuts carry more folate than any other widely eaten tree nut. Walnuts sit near 98 micrograms, cashews near 25, almonds near 44, pecans near 22. Only peanuts — botanically a legume, not a nut — come in higher.

Folate is the vitamin behind one-carbon metabolism: the shuttling of methyl groups that lets cells synthesise DNA and RNA bases, divide, and methylate everything from DNA to neurotransmitters to homocysteine. Requirements rise sharply wherever cells divide fast — in early pregnancy, in the bone marrow, in the gut lining. Inadequate folate shows up as megaloblastic anaemia, as elevated homocysteine, and, in the first weeks of pregnancy, as a raised risk of neural tube defects.

An ounce of hazelnuts supplies about 32 micrograms, which is 8% of a day's target — a real contribution but not a solution on its own. Nobody should treat nuts as a folate strategy for pregnancy; leafy greens, liver, lentils and beans are far denser, and the standard clinical advice for anyone who could become pregnant is a dedicated folic acid dose alongside a good diet. What hazelnuts do well is add folate to a food category that normally contributes none, which matters because nuts are eaten as snacks — between the meals where the vegetables live.

Hazelnut folate is a naturally occurring polyglutamate form, and folate is one of the more fragile vitamins: it degrades with heat, light and long storage. Raw kernels retain more than heavily roasted ones, and this is one of the few nutritional arguments for buying hazelnuts raw and toasting them yourself, briefly, at home.

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Oleic Acid: A Nut That Eats Like Olive Oil

Break the 60.8 grams of fat in 100 grams of hazelnuts into its fractions and the resemblance to olive oil is not approximate, it is close to exact. Monounsaturated fat — almost entirely oleic acid, an 18-carbon chain with a single double bond at position nine — makes up roughly three quarters of the total. Saturated fat accounts for about 7%. Polyunsaturated fat, mostly linoleic acid, makes up the remaining 13%. Extra-virgin olive oil runs about 73% monounsaturated, 14% saturated and 11% polyunsaturated. Hazelnut fat is, if anything, slightly lower in saturated fat than the oil.

The resemblance is close enough to create a genuine commercial fraud problem. Refined hazelnut oil is cheaper than good olive oil in some years, has a similar fatty acid signature, and once deodorised is very hard to detect by the standard chemical tests. Food chemists eventually built detection methods around trace aroma compounds and minor polar constituents that differ between the two oils. If your olive oil has been cut, there is a fair chance it was cut with hazelnut.

Why the oleic acid matters: monounsaturated fat is chemically stable. It has one double bond to attack rather than the two, three or six of the polyunsaturates, so it resists oxidation both on the shelf and inside a circulating LDL particle. Diets that replace saturated fat with monounsaturated fat lower LDL cholesterol without dropping HDL, and oleic-acid-rich LDL particles are measurably more resistant to oxidative modification — a change that matters because oxidised LDL is the form that macrophages take up to become foam cells in an arterial plaque. A Turkish trial that put hypercholesterolaemic adults on a hazelnut-enriched diet reported exactly that pattern: improved lipids, plus favourable changes in oxidation and inflammation markers that went beyond what the cholesterol change alone would predict.

One honest limitation. Hazelnuts contain very little alpha-linolenic acid — under 0.1 g per 100 g against nearly 8 g of linoleic acid. This is not an omega-3 food, and no amount of enthusiasm makes it one. If you want plant omega-3, that job belongs to walnuts, flaxseed and chia seeds, and the long-chain forms belong to oily fish. Hazelnuts and walnuts are complements, not substitutes: hazelnuts bring alpha-tocopherol and oleic acid, walnuts bring alpha-linolenic acid and gamma-tocopherol. Eating both is more sensible than choosing.

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Manganese, Copper and the Trace-Mineral Load

The single most extreme number on the hazelnut label is manganese: 6.2 mg per 100 g, nearly three times a day's Daily Value, and about 75% of it in one modest ounce. Manganese is a cofactor for manganese superoxide dismutase, the enzyme that disposes of superoxide inside mitochondria — the cell's most oxidatively stressed compartment. It is also required by arginase in the urea cycle, by prolidase in collagen turnover, and by glycosyltransferases that build the cartilage matrix. Frank manganese deficiency is rare in people eating whole foods, but the mineral is concentrated in nuts, whole grains, tea and leafy vegetables and thinly spread everywhere else, so highly refined diets run low.

Copper is the other standout, at 192% DV per 100 g and roughly half a day's worth in an ounce. Copper sits at the catalytic centre of cytochrome c oxidase, the final enzyme of the mitochondrial electron transport chain; of lysyl oxidase, which cross-links collagen and elastin so that blood vessels and skin hold their shape; of ceruloplasmin, which oxidises iron so transferrin can carry it; and of dopamine beta-hydroxylase, which converts dopamine to noradrenaline. Copper and zinc compete for the same intestinal transport, and sustained high-dose zinc supplementation is a recognised cause of copper deficiency — a reason to get both from food, where they arrive in sane proportions. Hazelnuts happen to supply them in a ratio of roughly 1.4 copper to 1 zinc by weight, which is copper-forward compared with most of the diet.

Beyond those two, hazelnuts are a solid source of magnesium at 39% DV per 100 g — a mineral involved in more than three hundred enzymatic reactions and one of the most commonly under-consumed in industrialised diets — and contribute meaningful iron, phosphorus and potassium. The iron is non-haem and therefore only modestly absorbed, especially in the presence of the nut's own phytate; eating hazelnuts with a vitamin C source improves that considerably.

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The Skin: Where the Polyphenols Live

The thin, papery brown skin on a hazelnut kernel — the pellicle — is where nearly all of the nut's polyphenol content sits. By weight, hazelnut skin carries on the order of a hundred times the phenolic concentration of the kernel it wraps. The dominant compounds are condensed tannins: proanthocyanidins built from catechin and epicatechin units, along with gallic acid, quercetin and caffeic acid derivatives. In the reference databases of proanthocyanidin content across the food supply, whole hazelnuts rank among the highest single entries — roughly 500 mg per 100 g, in the same league as the most concentrated berries and comfortably above most fruit.

Blanching removes almost all of it. Blanched hazelnuts — the pale, uniform, skinless kernels used in confectionery and baking — have been rubbed after light roasting precisely so that the skins flake off, because the skin is bitter and astringent and it looks untidy in a finished product. That is a reasonable choice for a pastry chef and a bad one for a person eating nuts for their nutritional value. If you buy hazelnuts to eat by the handful, buy them with the skins on, and accept the slight bitterness as the taste of the tannins doing their work.

Analytical work consistently finds far higher radical-scavenging capacity in hazelnut skin and green husk than in the kernel, which is why the food industry has spent two decades trying to turn skin — a bulk waste stream from the blanching lines — into an antioxidant ingredient. Keep the claim in proportion, though: a test-tube antioxidant assay measures chemistry, not health. What the polyphenols demonstrably do in people is reach the colon, where condensed tannins are metabolised by gut bacteria into smaller phenolic acids that are absorbed and detectable in blood and urine. The clinical benefits of nuts are almost certainly a sum of fat quality, fibre, minerals, sterols and polyphenols together, and no single fraction accounts for them.

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What the Human Trials Show

Hazelnuts have a smaller trial literature than almonds or walnuts, but it is not thin, and it points in a consistent direction. A systematic review with a Bayesian meta-analysis pooled the controlled hazelnut feeding studies and found reductions in LDL cholesterol and total cholesterol, no adverse effect on HDL or triglycerides, and — the finding people find hardest to believe — no weight gain across the studies despite the added calories.

That last point recurs across the whole nut literature and deserves an explanation rather than a shrug. Several mechanisms are documented. A substantial fraction of the fat in a whole nut is never absorbed at all: it stays trapped inside intact plant cell walls and passes through, so the metabolisable energy of a whole nut is measurably lower than the figure the label calculates. Nuts are highly satiating, so they displace other food rather than adding to it. Chewing a hard kernel takes time. And the protein and fat together slow gastric emptying. Grinding a nut into butter or paste breaks the cell walls and removes the first of those effects, which is one reason whole kernels behave better than pastes.

The broader dose-response picture comes from a meta-analysis of sixty-one controlled tree-nut intervention trials, which established that the lipid benefit scales with dose across the range people actually eat and is driven mainly by displacement of other fats. An Australasian study comparing different physical forms of hazelnut — whole, ground, and with or without skins — found lipid and alpha-tocopherol responses that differed by form, reinforcing the point above about processing.

For long-term outcomes we depend on cohorts and on one large randomised trial. The PREDIMED trial in Spain randomised more than seven thousand people at high cardiovascular risk to a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra-virgin olive oil, the same diet supplemented with mixed nuts, or a control diet, and followed them for a median of nearly five years. The nut arm's daily allowance was 30 grams of mixed nuts, of which 7.5 grams were hazelnuts. Both Mediterranean arms showed a lower incidence of major cardiovascular events than the control arm. Separately, the large Nurses' Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-up Study cohorts found that nut consumption was inversely associated with total mortality in a dose-dependent way, with the association holding after adjustment for the many other healthy behaviours that cluster with nut eating.

Two caveats belong here. Cohort data cannot prove causation, and people who eat nuts regularly differ from those who do not in ways no adjustment fully removes. And the hazelnut-specific trials are mostly small, short and conducted in people with elevated cholesterol. The honest summary is that hazelnuts fit comfortably into the eating pattern with the best cardiovascular evidence behind it, and that within that pattern they behave like the other tree nuts. That is a modest claim, and it is the one the evidence supports.

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Whole Hazelnuts Versus Confectionery Spreads

Most of the world's hazelnut crop does not reach anyone as a nut. It is turned into paste, blended with sugar and vegetable fat, and sold as confectionery — and the gap between those two products is the single most important thing on this page.

The history is genuinely interesting. In 1806 Napoleon's Continental System cut European ports off from colonial trade and cocoa became scarce in the Kingdom of Sardinia. Confectioners in Turin, sitting next to the hazelnut orchards of the Langhe hills, stretched their dwindling cocoa by grinding local hazelnuts into it. The result was gianduja, and it was better than what it replaced: the nut fat carried the cocoa flavour and gave the paste a smoothness plain chocolate could not match. The wrapped gianduiotto ingot appeared at the Turin carnival in the 1860s. After the Second World War, with cocoa rationed again, the Piedmontese pastry maker Pietro Ferrero made a firm hazelnut-cocoa loaf to be sliced onto bread; a spreadable version followed in 1951, and in 1964 it was reformulated and renamed Nutella. The line from a wartime cocoa shortage to the world's most recognisable chocolate spread is unbroken.

What that jar contains now is worth stating plainly, because the marketing leans hard on the hazelnut. By declared composition, the leading spread is roughly 55% sugar and about 30% palm oil. Hazelnuts are around 13%. Cocoa and milk powder make up most of the rest. In other words, more than four fifths of the product is sugar and refined vegetable fat, and the nut — the ingredient in the name and on the label illustration — is the fourth-largest component by weight.

Put the two side by side at realistic portions. A 37-gram serving of the spread, two tablespoons, contains about 21 grams of sugar and roughly 5 grams of actual hazelnut — the equivalent of about five kernels. A 28-gram handful of plain hazelnuts contains 28 grams of hazelnut, about 1.2 grams of naturally occurring sugar, 2.7 grams of fibre, 4.3 mg of vitamin E, 1.7 mg of manganese and half a day's copper. The spread has almost none of the mineral density, because you are eating one sixth as much nut, and it adds a sugar load the whole nut does not have. The same logic applies to hazelnut coffee syrups, hazelnut-flavoured wafers, praline fillings and hazelnut coffee creamers, none of which reliably contain any hazelnut at all — the aroma is often supplied by added flavouring.

None of this makes chocolate spread a poison. It makes it a confection, which is what it has been since 1806, and it should be eaten and thought about as one. If you want the hazelnut-and-cocoa combination with the nutrition intact, the honest version is a handful of hazelnuts with skins on alongside a square of high-percentage dark chocolate, or a jar of pure hazelnut butter whose ingredient list reads “hazelnuts” and stops there.

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Varieties and Where They Grow

Hazelnut cultivars differ enough to be worth knowing by name, because they are not interchangeable in the kitchen.

Hazels want mild wet winters, cool summers and freely draining soil, and they cannot tolerate hard late frosts, which is why the crop clusters on maritime slopes. The same wet mild climate that suits the plant also suits the moulds that spoil the nut — which is why storage discipline is not a fussy detail.

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Choosing, Storing and Preparing

Buying

Storing

Preparing

Ways to eat them

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How Much to Eat

The dose that appears across the nut research is roughly 30 grams a day — an ounce, about 21 hazelnut kernels, a cupped handful. That is the amount used in the PREDIMED nut arm, the amount at the centre of most controlled feeding studies, and the amount at which the cohort associations with lower mortality are already visible. Higher intakes have been tested and are well tolerated; the trials that used 40 to 70 grams a day of hazelnuts did not report weight gain over their duration. But there is no evidence of extra benefit from pushing the portion, and there is a straightforward argument for restraint: at 178 kcal an ounce, hazelnuts are one of the easiest foods in the world to eat absent-mindedly from a bowl.

Some practical guidance:

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Who Should Be Careful

Tree-nut allergy — the serious one

Hazelnut is among the most frequently reported tree-nut allergies in Europe, and the clinical picture splits into two quite different patterns depending on which protein the immune system has recognised.

The mild pattern is driven by Cor a 1, a PR-10 protein closely similar in shape to the major birch pollen allergen. People with birch pollen hay fever often react to raw hazelnut with itching, tingling or swelling confined to the lips, mouth and throat — oral allergy syndrome. Cor a 1 is fragile: it is destroyed by heat and by stomach acid, so many of these people tolerate roasted hazelnut or hazelnut in baked goods without trouble. The reactions are usually local and usually mild, though not invariably.

The severe pattern is driven by the storage proteins Cor a 9, an 11S globulin, and Cor a 14, a 2S albumin. These are stable to heat and to digestion, and sensitisation to them — measurable by component-resolved blood testing — is strongly associated with objective systemic reactions including anaphylaxis. A large Dutch study of children and adults established that specificity clearly. A third protein, Cor a 8, a lipid transfer protein, produces a more severe pattern common around the Mediterranean and is likewise heat-stable.

What this means in practice:

Mould toxins and storage

Hazelnuts are one of the food categories most often flagged in international food safety alerts for aflatoxin, a group of potent liver toxins and carcinogens produced by Aspergillus flavus and related moulds. The risk follows humid growing, drying and storage conditions — precisely the situation on a wet maritime hillside. Regulated commercial supply is tested and exposure from properly handled nuts is small. Reduce your own risk by buying from sellers with high turnover, rejecting shrivelled or discoloured kernels, discarding any nut that tastes musty or sharply bitter, and never storing nuts warm and humid. Do not try to salvage a batch by picking out the bad ones.

Choking

Whole nuts are a genuine choking hazard for children under roughly four or five years old, and hazelnuts are exactly the wrong size and hardness. Give young children hazelnut butter spread thin, or finely ground nuts stirred into food — both of which deliver the nutrition without the risk. Whole nuts also warrant care in anyone with a swallowing disorder.

Phytate, oxalate and mineral absorption

Like all seeds, hazelnuts contain phytic acid, the plant's phosphorus store, which binds iron, zinc and calcium in the gut and reduces their absorption. Hazelnut phytate levels are moderate — lower than almonds and much lower than most legumes — and in a varied diet the effect is not a practical concern. If you rely heavily on plant sources of iron, pair nuts with a vitamin C food and keep tea and coffee away from the meal; soaking helps modestly.

Hazelnuts also contain a moderate amount of oxalate — less than almonds, more than most other nuts. People who form calcium-oxalate kidney stones are generally advised to keep nut portions to about an ounce, take them with a calcium-containing food so the oxalate binds in the gut rather than the kidney, and drink generously. This is worth raising with the clinician managing the stones, since advice is individual.

Copper, manganese and specific conditions

The very high copper and manganese density that makes hazelnuts valuable also makes them relevant to two uncommon situations. Wilson's disease, an inherited disorder of copper excretion, is managed in part with a copper-restricted diet, and nuts — hazelnuts especially — are on the list of foods to limit. And people with cholestatic liver disease or on long-term parenteral nutrition can accumulate manganese, since the liver is the main route of elimination; that is a clinical management question, not a reason for anyone with a healthy liver to worry. Manganese toxicity from ordinary food intake is not a recognised problem.

Medications and other notes

None of this is medical advice, and nothing here replaces a conversation with the clinician who knows your history. Hazelnuts are a food; for most people they are a straightforwardly good one, eaten by the handful, with the skins on.

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Connections

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References & Research

Citations below give author, title, journal and year as plain text. Each links to a PubMed search built from the article title rather than to a numeric identifier, so that the reader always lands on the live record rather than on a mistyped one.

  1. Perna S, Giacosa A, Bonitta G, Bologna C, Isu A, Guido D, Rondanelli M. Effects of Hazelnut Consumption on Blood Lipids and Body Weight: A Systematic Review and Bayesian Meta-Analysis. Nutrients, 2016. Search PubMed
  2. Michels AJ, Leonard SW, Uesugi SL, Bobe G, Frei B, Traber MG. Daily Consumption of Oregon Hazelnuts Affects Alpha-Tocopherol Status in Healthy Older Adults: A Pre-Post Intervention Study. The Journal of Nutrition, 2018. Search PubMed
  3. Orem A, Yucesan FB, Orem C, Akcan B, Kural BV, Alasalvar C, Shahidi F. Hazelnut-enriched diet improves cardiovascular risk biomarkers beyond a lipid-lowering effect in hypercholesterolemic subjects. Journal of Clinical Lipidology, 2013. Search PubMed
  4. Tey SL, Brown RC, Chisholm AW, Delahunty CM, Gray AR, Williams SM. Effects of different forms of hazelnuts on blood lipids and alpha-tocopherol concentrations in mildly hypercholesterolemic individuals. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2011. Search PubMed
  5. Del Gobbo LC, Falk MC, Feldman R, Lewis K, Mozaffarian D. Effects of tree nuts on blood lipids, apolipoproteins, and blood pressure: systematic review, meta-analysis, and dose-response of 61 controlled intervention trials. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2015. Search PubMed
  6. Estruch R, Ros E, Salas-Salvado J, Covas MI, Corella D, Aros F, et al. Primary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease with a Mediterranean Diet Supplemented with Extra-Virgin Olive Oil or Nuts. The New England Journal of Medicine, 2018. Search PubMed
  7. Bao Y, Han J, Hu FB, Giovannucci EL, Stampfer MJ, Willett WC, Fuchs CS. Association of nut consumption with total and cause-specific mortality. The New England Journal of Medicine, 2013. Search PubMed
  8. Masthoff LJ, Mattsson L, Zuidmeer-Jongejan L, Lidholm J, Andersson K, Akkerdaas JH, et al. Sensitization to Cor a 9 and Cor a 14 is highly specific for a hazelnut allergy with objective symptoms in Dutch children and adults. The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, 2013. Search PubMed
  9. Alasalvar C, Karamac M, Amarowicz R, Shahidi F. Antioxidant and antiradical activities in extracts of hazelnut kernel (Corylus avellana L.) and hazelnut green leafy cover. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2006. Search PubMed
  10. Strate LL, Liu YL, Syngal S, Aldoori WH, Giovannucci EL. Nut, corn, and popcorn consumption and the incidence of diverticular disease. JAMA, 2008. Search PubMed

Composition figures on this page come from national food composition data for raw hazelnut kernels and are averages: real values shift with cultivar, season and storage, so treat them as reliable to within a few percent rather than as exact. The Mesolithic material in the history section comes from the published excavation of Staosnaig on the Isle of Colonsay, Scotland, which lies in the archaeological literature rather than the biomedical one and so carries no PubMed record.

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