A piece of fruit a day keeps heart attacks away. New research revealed that people who eat fruit most of the week are significantly less likely to experience heart attacks and strokes compared to those who rarely eat fresh fruit.
The latest findings come from a seven-year study involving half a million adults living in China, where people are less likely to eat fresh fruit compared to other countries like the United States or United Kingdom.
To examine the benefits of fruit consumption, researchers from the University of Oxford and Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences looked at 512,891 adults aged 30 to 70 from 10 urban and rural localities in China. Researchers tracked the health and death records of participants through electronic hospital records between 2004 and 2008, noting that none of the participants in the study had cardiovascular diseases or high blood pressure at the beginning of the study.
Study analysis revealed that participants who ate 100 grams of fruit a day were a third less likely to die of cardiovascular-related conditions. Researchers said the findings were similar for men and women.
"The association between fruit consumption and cardiovascular risk seems to be stronger in China, where many still eat little fruit, than in high-income countries where daily consumption of fruit is more common," said Dr. Huaidong Du of the University of Oxford, who co-led the study.
The study also revealed that apples and oranges consisted of most of the fruit consumed by participants in the study. Higher fruit consumption was also positively associated with other factors like education, low blood glucose, low blood pressure and healthy lifestyle habits like not using tobacco, according to researchers.
"Among Chinese adults, a higher level of fruit consumption was associated with lower blood pressure and blood glucose levels and, largely independent of these and other dietary and non-dietary factors, with significantly lower risks of major cardiovascular diseases," researchers wrote.
"It's difficult to know whether the lower risk in people who eat more fresh fruit is because of a real protective effect," concluded Zhengming Chen, the study's senior author and a professor at the University of Oxford. "If it is, then widespread consumption of fresh fruit in China could prevent about half a million cardiovascular deaths a year, including 200,000 before age 70, and even larger numbers of non-fatal strokes and heart attacks."
The findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
