Consuming fruits regularly almost halves heart disease risk

A new study has suggested that eating fruits on a daily basis minimizes the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) up to 40percent.

The study presented at ESC Congress observed that that the more fruit people ate, the more their risk of CVD declined.

Dr Du said that CVD, including ischaemic heart disease (IHD) and stroke, was the leading cause of death worldwide and improving diet and lifestyle was critical for CVD risk reduction in the general population but the large majority of this evidence had come from western countries and hardly any from China.

She added that China had a different pattern of CVD, with stroke as the main cause compared to western countries where IHD is more prevalent. Previous studies had combined ischaemic and haemorrhagic stroke probably due to the limited number of stroke cases in their datasets and given their different physiology and risk factors, they had conducted the first large prospective study on the association of fruit with subtypes of stroke in Chinese adults from both rural and urban areas.

The researchers found out that compared to people who never ate fruit, those who ate fruit daily cut their CVD risks by 25-40percent and there was a dose response relationship between the frequency of fruit consumption and the risk of CVD.

The researchers concluded that their results demonstrated that the benefit of eating fruit in the healthy general population and in patients with CVD and hypertension and fruit consumption was an effective way to cut CVD risk and should not only be regarded as might be useful.