nutrients Article Nut and Peanut Butter Consumption and Mortality in the National Institutes of Health-AARP Diet and Health Study Vineeth Amba 1,2, Gwen Murphy 1, Arash Etemadi 1,3, ShaoMing Wang 1, Christian C. Abnet 1 and Maryam Hashemian 1,3,* 1 Metabolic Epidemiology Branch, Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Rockville, MD 20850, USA 2 The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ 08628, USA 3 Digestive Oncology Research Center, Digestive Diseases Research Institute, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, 14117-13135 Tehran, Iran * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +1(240)-276-7873 Received: 19 April 2019; Accepted: 28 June 2019; Published: 2 July 2019 Abstract: Although previous studies have shown inverse associations between nut consumption and mortality, the associations between nut consumption and less common causes of mortality have not been investigated. Additionally, about 50% of peanut consumption in the US is through peanut butter but the association between peanut butter consumption and mortality has not been thoroughly evaluated. The National Institutes of Health-AARP (NIH-AARP) Diet and Health Study recruited 566,398 individuals aged 50–71 at baseline in 1995–1996. A food-frequency questionnaire was used to evaluate nut and peanut butter consumption. Cox proportional hazard models were used to estimate hazard ratios and 95% confidence intervals for mortality using the non-consumers as reference groups and three categories of consumption. After excluding subjects with chronic diseases at baseline, there were 64,464 deaths with a median follow-up time of 15.5 years. We observed a significant inverse association between nut consumption and overall mortality (HR C4 vs C1 = 0.78, 95% CI = 0.76, 0.81, p 0.001).