Daily peanuts changed an insulin-linked brain blood-flow signal in adults aged 60 to 75

What the research found

SciTechDaily reported this on 27 October 2026. Peter Joris and colleagues at Maastricht University's NUTRIM institute published in Food and Function on 30 September 2026 (DOI 10.1039/d6fo03208g). In a randomized crossover, 31 adults aged 60 to 75 spent 16 weeks on a daily food portion of peanuts and 16 weeks off. Sex was not stated. The portion was 60 g a day (about 2.1 ounces) of unsalted skin-roasted peanuts. They measured cerebral blood flow with arterial-spin-labeling MRI after intranasal insulin. One cluster in the right hemisphere (lingual gyrus, hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, thalamus, and posterior cingulate) showed a different blood-flow response to intranasal insulin versus the control period: -5.4 plus or minus 5.4 mL per 100 g of tissue per minute. An earlier 2025 Clinical Nutrition paper from the same intervention reported 3.6 percent higher global cerebral blood flow and 5.8 percent higher verbal memory. The Peanut Institute Foundation funded the work and had no role in design, implementation, analysis, interpretation, or writing. The sample is small. This is not a dementia treatment. It is a different study from the peanut lipid signature in younger adults. Not medical advice.

Evidence level: Clinical trial. This is among the stronger kinds of evidence, but one study rarely settles a question.

Read the original at SciTechDaily