Include vegetables in your diet can have many benefits for your health although a new study says that it is not everything. There are things that it doesn’t protect you from, so it’s time to banish some myths.
Researchers from the universities of Oxford and Bristol (United Kingdom) and the University of Hong Kong (China) found no evidence that eating vegetables is effective in preventing such ailments and they considered that previous studies pointing in this direction had not taken into account socioeconomic or lifestyle factors.
The new studio published today in the journal “Frontiers in Nutrition”shows that it is “unlikely” that a higher consumption of vegetables, cooked or raw, has an impact on the risk of developing cardiovascular disease (CVD).
The researchers set out for their analysis of the data stored in the large-scale UK Biobank study, which tracks the health of half a million adults in the UK who voluntarily signed up for the program between 2006 and 2010 and who are regularly asked about their diet, lifestyle and medical history.
“The UK Biobank is a large-scale prospective study of how genetics and the environment contribute to the development of the most common and deadly diseases”Naomi Allen, chief scientist for that program and co-author of the study, said in a statement.
“We have used the large, long-term follow-up of the Biobank and the detailed information on social and lifestyle factors to assess the association between vegetable intake and CVD risk,” he added.
For this research, the experts used the responses from 399,586 participants – of which 4.5% developed CVD – about their vegetable consumption and related them to other possible influencing factors, such as physical exercise and socioeconomic status.
They discovered that the risk of dying from CVD was 15% lower among those with the highest consumption of vegetables than in the lower intake segment.
However, the note points out, “That apparent effect was substantially weakened when other potential socioeconomic, nutritional, and medical factors were taken into account.”
The introduction of these factors reduced the predictive power of vegetable intake by 80%, which pointed to its importance in the global analysis.
“Our study found no evidence of a protective effect of vegetable consumption against CVD. Instead, our analyzes show that it is very likely that the apparent protective effect of vegetables has a bias that does not take into account other factors”said Qi Feng, an Oxford researcher and lead author of the study.