Daily Fruit Decreases Heart Disease and Death, Research Says

Eating fruit every day could reduce risk of cardiovascular disease by 25 to 40 percent, and the more fruit you eat the more this risk declines, suggests the results of a study of almost half a million people presented recently to the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).

Dr. Huaidong Du from Oxford, U.K., presented the findings from the seven-year follow-up study of nearly 0.5 million people in the China Kadoorie Biobank at the society meeting in Barcelona, Spain. The researchers also found that people who consumed fruit more often had significantly lower blood pressure (BP).

In a separate analysis, the researchers examined the association of fruit consumption with total mortality and cardiovascular mortality in more than 61,000 patients from the China Kadoorie Biobank who had cardiovascular disease or high blood pressure. They found that compared with those who never ate fruit, daily consumers of fruit cut their overall risk of death by 32 percent.

For additional details about the China Kadoorie Biobank study, visit http://www.ckbiobank.org/site/