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16.04.2020

These two types of vegetables boost your vascular health

Sure, vegetables are healthy for your arteries, but one type of vegetables offers more vascular protection than the other. If you want to protect yourself against atherosclerosis, cabbage is more effective than tomatoes, spinach or beans. And onions and garlic offer even more protection than cabbage. Researchers at the University of Western Australia report this in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

Study
The researchers used the data from 1,226 Australian women, all of whom were 70 or older when the study began in 1998. The researchers knew the women's diet and followed them for 15 years. They tracked which women died as a result of blood vessel clogging or, as cardiologists prefer to say, atherosclerosis.

Results
The more vegetables the women ate, the lower their chance of fatal atherosclerosis. The women who ate vegetables 3 or more times a day were 42 percent less likely to die from artherosclerosis than the women who ate vegetables less than 2 times a day.

When the researchers looked at each type of vegetable separately, they saw that for every 10 grams of cabbage vegetables [broccoli, kale, sprouts] per day, the chance of dying from atherosclerosis decreased by 17 percent. Every 5 grams of an allium vegetable [chives, garlic, onions, leeks] per day reduced the risk of death by 18 percent.

For comparison, 75 grams of vegetables in general per day reduced the risk of death from atherosclerosis by 20 percent.

The researchers suspect that the main actives in cabbage vegetables are glucosinolates and isothiocyanates. These are sulfur-containing substances with an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effect. You can read more about the health effects of glucosinolates here and here.

Allium vegetables also contain sulfur-containing substances, such as allicin. You can read more about the biological effects of allicin here, here and here.

Conclusion
"In a cohort of older Australian women, higher intakes of cruciferous and allium vegetables were independently associated with lower risk of atherosclerotic vascular disease mortality", the Australians summarize their findings.

"Cruciferous and allium vegetables are recognized to be a good source of several nonnutritive phytochemicals such as organosulfur compounds. If future studies support our findings, dietary guidelines promoting increased vegetable intake could highlight the importance of cruciferous and allium vegetables for vascular health."

Source:
J Am Heart Assoc. 2017;6:e006558.

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A little garlic every day makes you live three years longer Chinese and American epidemiologists come to this conclusion in a study published in Nutrients.	Longevity tip: eat spicy foods 2-3 times a week If you treat yourself to a meal with a lot of red pepper a couple of times a week, then your chances of getting old are greater than if you eat red pepper less often.	If you eat more of these foods, you will live longer The more foods such as espresso, blueberries, raspberries, olives, peppers and spinach you eat daily, the longer you may live. The antioxidants in these products reduce the risk of deadly forms of cancer and cardiovascular diseases.