Can Apples and Artichokes Save Your Heart?

Can fruits and veggies prevent heart attacks? New studies show that may be true. So you want to start eating extra helpings of apples and maybe even artichokes. For decades, we’ve been told that eating lots of fruits and vegetables will prevent cancer, help us stay slim and trim, ward off strange diseases like rickets and beriberi and many other ailments that we run across in our daily lives. Now it appears through recent studies that fruits and vegetables can also prevent heart attack and can be considered healthy heart foods. In a study published in the European Heart journal on January 18, 2011, Francesca Crowe, of the Cancer Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford, England, led a team of researchers examining records of more tha 300,000 people aged 40 to 85 enrolled in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition. Followed for an average of more than eight years, the study population experienced 1636 deaths from ischemic heart disease - the type in which low blood supply can trigger a heart attack. It wasn’t the number of heart-related deaths that surprised the research team, however - it was the subjects’ fruit and vegetable intake. This lead to a new thought on what could be considered healthy heart foods. The team discovered a dose-dependent link between fruit and vegetable intake and heart death. That is, the higher the intake of fruits and veggies, the lower the risk for heart attack. The lower the intake of fruits and vegetables, the higher the risk for heart attack.Specifically, for every serving above two servings per day, the risk of dying from a heart attack dropped by four percent. People who averaged eight or more servings per day reduced their risk by 22 percent. A "serving" in this study was defined as 80 grams, or 2.8 ounces - the equivalent of a small banana, half an apple or orange, or half a cup of broccoli stalks or carrot slices. Crow cautioned people not to assume a causal relationship, however. "The association between fruit and vegetable intake and risk of ischemic heart disease [may be] due to some other component of diet or lifestyle," she said. For example, fruit and vegetable fans might just happen to be the same kind of people who watch their cholesterol and blood pressure more closely than others. More research should provide clues.