A White
Apple-a-Day Keeps the Stroke Doctor Away
Linda M Oude Griep, MSc, from the division of Human Nutrition at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, wants you to eat your fruits and vegetables. If you’re included in the group of people who find themselves at risk for stroke, Linda wants you to eat the vegetables with white flesh.
Griep completed a 10-year study, recently published in Stroke, that points to the white color groupings of vegetables has having specific beneficial health effects. Griep cautions that since this is the first study to point to a correlation between the health benefits of certain color groups of vegetables, no definite conclusions can be made. Furthermore, “there are more studies needed to confirm these findings.”
“It’s also the case that maybe other color groups of fruits and vegetables may protect against other chronic diseases, so it remains of importance that patients eat a wide variety of fruits and vegetables.”
The study was a population-based questionnaire including over 20,000 individuals aged 20 to 65, and free of cardiovascular disease at baseline. Which fruits and vegetables in particular contribute the most towards reducing stroke risk because of overall high consumption is not known, and that was the primary aim of the study.
The results were significant. According to the data, each 25g/day increase in the consumption of white fruits and vegetables was associated with a 9% decrease in stroke risk. With the average apple being around 150 grams, this brings the stroke risk reduction to the 50% range.
In an editorial accompanying the publication, Heike Wersching, MD, from the University of Muenster Institute of Epidemiology and Social Medicine, Germany, addresses the fact that the study focuses on the effects of food groups, allowing for the synergy of different nutrients in whole foods and vegetables.
Dr. Wersching points out, “this approach is of particular importance in the active prevention of cerebrovascular disease, as it directly translates into healthy food choices." In other words, eating vegetables is eating healthy, and eating healthy is a full-spectrum approach to staving off disease and ailments.
Griep expresses possibility that other color groupings may have similar advantageous effects, but for different (types of) diseases. It could be the case that, for instance, eating all red vegetables or fruits has a positive effect in another manner.
Wersching likewise calls for the need for more testing, echoing Griep’s insistence to interpret these early findings with caution. “If replication is successful in independent studies and countries, the time for an ‘apple-a-day’ clinical trial has come.”
|