apple a day Archives - Amazing Health Advances

Flavonoid Benefits from Apple Peels

The AHA! Team — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 08:28:19 +0000

Michael Greger M.D. FACLM via Nutrition Facts – Peeled apples are pitted head-to-head against unpeeled apples (and spinach) in a test of artery function. Regularly eating apples may contribute to a lower risk of dying prematurely. “Moderate apple consumption,” meaning one or two apples a week, “was associated with a 20% lower risk of all-cause mortality”—that is, dying from all causes put together—“whereas those who ate an apple a day had a 35% lower risk of all-cause mortality compared with women with low apple consumption.” You’ll often hear me talking about a lower or higher risk of mortality, but what does that mean? Isn’t the risk of dying 100 percent for everyone, eventually? As you can see in my graph below and at 0:40 in my video Friday Favorites: For Flavonoid Benefits, Don’t Peel Apples, I present some survival curves to help you visualize these concepts. For example, if you follow thousands of older women over time, nearly half succumb over a period of 15 years, but that half includes those who rarely, if ever, ate apples—less than 20 apples a year. Those who ate one small apple or about a quarter of a large apple a day survived even longer Instead, those averaging more like half a small apple a day lived longer; over the same time period, closer to 40 percent or so of them died. And those who ate one small apple or about a quarter of a large apple a day survived even longer. Why is that the case? It seems to be less the apple of one’s eye than the apple of one’s arteries. Even a fraction of an apple a day is associated with 24 percent lower odds of having severe major artery calcifications, a marker of vascular disease. You may think that’s an obvious benefit since apples are fruits and fruits are healthy, but the effect was not found for pears, oranges, or bananas. Both of these studies were done on women, but a similar effect (with apples and onions) was found for men. We think it’s because of the flavonoids, naturally occurring phytonutrients concentrated in apples. As you can see below and at 2:02 in my video, they’re thought to improve artery function and lower blood pressure, leading to improvements in blood flow throughout the body and brain, thereby decreasing the risk of heart disease and strokes. You don’t know, though, until you put it to the test. When I first saw a paper on testing flavonoid-rich apples, I assumed they had selectively bred or genetically engineered a special apple. But, no. The high-flavonoid apple was just an apple with its peel, compared to the low-flavonoid apple, which was the exact same apple with its peel removed. After eating the apples, flavonoid levels in the bloodstream shot up over the next three hours in the unpeeled apple group, compared to the peeled group, as you can see below, and at 2:36 in my video. This coincided with significantly improved artery function in the unpeeled apple group compared to the peeled one. The researchers concluded that “the lower risk of CVD [cardiovascular disease] with higher apple consumption is most likely due to the high concentration of ﬂavonoids in the skin which improve endothelial [arterial] function”—though, it could be anything in the peel. All we know is that apple peels are particularly good for us, improving artery function and lowering blood pressure. Even compared to spinach? As you can see in the graph below and at 3:14 in my video, if you give someone about three-quarters of a cup of cooked spinach, their blood pressure drops within two to three hours. If you instead eat an apple with some extra peel thrown in, you get a similar effect. The researchers concluded that apples and spinach almost immediately improve artery function and lower blood pressure. Researchers concluded that apples and spinach almost immediately improve artery function and lower blood pressure What’s nice about these results is that we’re talking about whole foods, not some supplement or extract. So, easily, “this could be translated into a natural and low-cost method of reducing the cardiovascular risk profile of the general population.” For more about apples, see the topic page and check out the related videos below. What about dried apples? See Dried Apples vs. Cholesterol. What about apple cider vinegar? Check out Flashback Friday: Does Apple Cider Vinegar Help with Weight Loss?. And what about apples going head-to-head with açai berries? See The Antioxidant Effects of Açai vs. Apples. Key Takeaways Women eating one apple a day had a 35 percent lower risk of dying from all causes (compared with women with low apple consumption) and a 20 percent lower risk after eating one or two apples a week. Women consuming even a fraction of a single apple a day had 24 percent lower odds of having severe major artery calcifications, a marker of vascular disease. This effect was not found for pears, oranges, or bananas. A similar effect was found for men eating apples and onions. It’s thought that the flavonoids, naturally occurring phytonutrients in apples, improve artery function and lower blood pressure, thereby decreasing heart disease and stroke risks. When testing flavonoid-rich apples, researchers compared the effects of eating apples with their peels on versus removed. Eating unpeeled apples resulted in higher flavonoid levels in the bloodstream and significantly improved artery function, compared to eating apples without their skins. Consuming spinach, like apples with their peels, almost immediately improves artery function and lowers blood pressure. To read the original article click here.

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An Apple a Day May Keep the Pharmacist Away

AHA Publisher — Mon, 16 May 2022 07:21:27 +0000

Michael Greger M.D. FACLM via Nutrition Facts – Which would save more lives: eating an apple a day or taking statin drugs? Does an apple a day really keep the doctor away? That’s a public health message that’s beenaround since 1866, but is it true? You don’t know, until you put it to the test. As I discuss in my video Flashback Friday: Does an Apple a Day Really Keep the Doctor Away?. The objective of “The Association Between Apple Consumption and Physician Visits,” an article published in the American Medical Association’s internal medicine journal, was simple: “To examine the relationship between eating an apple a day and keeping the doctor away.” The message has been “promoted by the lay media and powerful special interest groups, including the US Apple Association”—a force so powerful that it spent a whopping $7,000 lobbying politicians during the 2017-18 election cycle. (Okay, so maybe Big Apple is more like an itty bitty appletini.) At any rate, the beneficial effects of apple consumption may include facilitation of “weight loss, prevention of neurologic degradation [protection of the brain], cancer suppression, reduction in asthma symptoms, and improved cardiovascular health.” So, apple consumers ought to require less medical care, right? “Although some may jest, considering the relatively low cost of apples…a prescription for apple consumption could potentially reduce national health care spending if the aphorism holds true.” Researchers compared daily apple eaters to non-apple eaters and asked if they had been to the doctor in the last year, been hospitalized, seen a mental health professional, or took any prescription medication within the last month. More than 8,000 individuals were surveyed, and only about one out of ten reported they had eaten an apple in the last 24 hours. The finding? “Evidence does not support that an apple a day keeps the doctor away…” Maybe it takes more than an apple a day? Maybe we need to center our whole diet around plant foods. “However, the small fraction of US adults who eat an apple a day do appear to use fewer prescription medications.” Given that, perhaps we should “update the well-known proverb to clarify that, if anything, apple eating may help keep the pharmacist away.” But, based on the average medical prescription cost, the researchers estimate that “the difference in annual prescription medication cost per capita between apple eaters ($1697) and non-apple eaters ($1925) to be $228”—hundreds of dollars saved. So, if all U.S. adults were apple eaters, we could save nearly $50 billion. Of course, if you factor in the cost of the apples themselves, our net savings would be closer to $19 billion, but that’s still a hefty chunk of change. If this all seems a bit like tongue-in-cheek-apple-polishing, you may be tickled to learn this study was published suspiciously close to April Fool’s Day. Indeed, this was in the tradition of the British Medical Journal’s annual Christmas issue that features scientifically rigorous, yet light-hearted, research. In fact, the BMJ itself took on the apple issue to model the effects on stroke and heart attack mortality of all older adults prescribed either a cholesterol-lowering statin drug or an apple a day. Essentially, researchers took studies like the one I show at 3:06 in my video, where we see a nice dose response indicating the more fruit you eat, the lower your stroke risk appears to fall, as well as similar data found for heart disease compared to the known drug effects, and concluded that prescribing an apple a day “is likely to have a similar effect” on population stroke and heart attack mortality as giving everyone statin drugs instead. Bonus that apples only have good side effects. “Choosing apples rather than statins may avoid more than a thousand excess cases of myopathy [muscle damage] and more than 12 000 excess diabetes diagnoses” (because statins increase the risk of diabetes). And, this article was from the UK. In the United States, one would expect five times those numbers. Ironically, though, the cost of apples is likely to be greater than that of statin drugs. (Generic Lipitor is only around 20 cents a day.) So, yes, “with similar reductions in mortality, the 150 year old health promotion message [of an apple a day] is able to match modern medicine and is likely to have fewer side effects,” but apples are a few pennies a day more expensive, not to mention they “require the more complex and time consuming process of coordinated mastication and swallowing.” Just one gulp with the drug compared to all that time-consuming chewing… Should we see our doctors every year regardless of how we’re feeling? See my videos Is It Worth Getting Annual Health Check-Ups?, Is It Worth Getting an Annual Physical Exam?, and Flashback Friday: Worth Getting Annual Health Check-Ups and Physical Exam?. Do you like the thought of taking a more food-based approach to treatment? If so, you’ll love lifestyle medicine. Check out Lifestyle Medicine: Treating the Causes of Disease. Sadly, Physicians May Be Missing Their Most Important Tool. KEY TAKEAWAYS The public health message an apple a day keeps the doctor away has been circulating since 1866. Benefits of apple consumption may include facilitation of weight loss, protection of the brain, cancer suppression, reduced asthma symptoms, and improved cardiovascular health. When researchers compared daily apple eaters to non-apple eaters, they found that evidence does not support the well-known proverb, although those eating an apple a day do appear to use fewer prescription drugs. Given average medical prescription costs, researchers estimated that each person could save hundreds of dollars annually just by eating apples. In fact, if all U.S. adults ate apples, we could save about $19 billion after factoring in the cost of the fruits themselves. The more fruits we eat, the lower our stroke risk appears to fall. Researchers concluded that a daily apple may have a similar effect on stroke and heart attack mortality as statin drugs, and apples only have good side effects, unlike statins, which increase the risk of diabetes. To read the original article click here.

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