Do carrots ward off heart attacks?A healthy diet of beta-carotene might reduce senior citizens' risk of heart attacks, a Dutch study finds. Kerstin Klipstein-Grobusch of Erasmus University Erasmus University Rotterdam is a university in the Netherlands, located in Rotterdam. The university is named after Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, a 15th century humanist and theologian. in Rotterdam and her colleagues analyzed diets, smoking habits, and other heart-disease risks among 4,800 men and women. Of this group, 124 experienced a first heart attack within 4 years of entering the large, ongoing Rotterdam Study The Rotterdam Study is a prospective, population-based cohort study. The aim of the Rotterdam Study is to investigate factors that determine the occurrence of cardiovascular, neurological, ophthalmological, endocrinological, and psychiatric diseases in elderly people. of the elderly. Relatively few of the heart-attack victims had a diet rich in beta-carotene. However, the researchers find, people who ate at least 1.6 milligrams of beta-carotene per day had only 55 percent the heart-attack risk of those whose average daily diet contained no more than 1.1 mg of the antioxidant antioxidant, substance that prevents or slows the breakdown of another substance by oxygen. Synthetic and natural antioxidants are used to slow the deterioration of gasoline and rubber, and such antioxidants as vitamin C (ascorbic acid), butylated hydroxytoluene . Overall, smokers and former smokers appeared to gain a slightly larger benefit than nonsmokers from eating plenty of beta-carotene-rich foods. A report of the work appears in the February American Journal of Clinical Nutrition Clinical nutrition The use of diet and nutritional supplements as a way to enhance health prevent disease. Mentioned in: Naturopathic Medicine . |
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