NEW YORK - Women who eat dried apple every day for a year see a persistent
decrease in their cholesterol levels, according to a new study.
In comparison, women who ate
prunes daily maintained steady levels over a year, suggesting that the fruit
could keep cholesterol numbers from rising.
"Both apples and dried plum
are pretty powerful in keeping the cholesterol at bay," said Bahram
Arjmandi, the lead author of the study and the chair of the department of
Nutrition, Food, and Exercise Sciences at Florida State University.
While eating fruit seems
beneficial, the study could not say whether women's cholesterol would have been
any different if they hadn't added the prunes or apples to their diets, because
it did not include women who didn't eat one of the fruits.
Arjmandi said there have been
earlier studies looking at the health effects of apples, but not a clear
experiment in humans on whether eating them can alter risk factors for heart
disease.
"As much as there is a
feeling that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, there has not been much
study done," he said.
Arjmandi and his colleagues asked
45 women to eat about 75 grams (roughly two apples' worth) of dried apple each
day for a year.
In comparison, 55 women ate 100
grams of dried plum daily for a year.
At the beginning of the study and
after three, six and 12 months, the women gave a blood sample to measure
cholesterol.
All of the women had gone through
menopause, a factor that is normally tied to a rise in cholesterol levels,
Arjmandi said. And average levels started below 200 milligrams per deciliter of
blood, the threshold above which guidelines typically say otherwise healthy
people are at increased risk of heart attack and stroke.
After three months, those who ate
prunes saw no difference in their cholesterol levels, and those levels remained
steady at the 12 month mark.
Among those who ate dried apple,
total cholesterol dropped by nine per cent and LDL cholesterol (considered the
"bad" form of cholesterol) also dropped by 16 per cent.
After six months, the
apple-eaters saw their total cholesterol drop even further, to 13 per cent less
than what it was at the beginning of the study, and LDL cholesterol dropped by
24 per cent.
At 12 months out, the cholesterol
levels remained lowered.
"The extent to which
especially apples reduced bad cholesterol, it went beyond my own imagination.
So powerful," Arjmandi told Reuters Health.
Still, the study did not look at
whether such reductions had an impact on the long-term health of the women.
Subjects stayed essentially the same weight throughout the 12 months.
COMPARING APPLES AND STATINS
Statins can achieve considerable
cholesterol reductions too, but as Arjmandi and his colleagues point out in
their report in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, such
drugs cost billions of dollars every year in the US and carry some side
effects.
Fruit, on the other hand, is part
of a healthy diet, and the US Department of Agriculture encourages people to
eat fruits and vegetables.
It's unclear how the women's
cholesterol would have changed if they hadn't eaten the fruit, because
"there was no control group," said Frank Sacks, a professor at the
Harvard School of Public Health, by email.
In other words, Arjmandi's team
did not compare the fruit-eaters to women who were not asked to add dried fruit
to their diet.
Additionally, while the group of
women who ate apples saw LDL cholesterol reductions over time, those reductions
resulted in levels that ended up to be no different than those of the women who
ate prunes.
Sacks told Reuters Health that
studying the health effects of one food item might have been helpful, "if
it identified a food that has beneficial effects on risk factors for heart
disease."
Arjmandi said he's convinced by
the health benefits of eating fruit, but for others, "adding a couple of
apples (a day) is not a simple thing to do. If you are not a believer that it
will do you a whole lot of benefit, you will not do it regularly."
Reuters
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