Doctor says people 'should eat one fruit' to maintain a healthy heart
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In the UK, cardiovascular disease is a major cause of death accounting for around a quarter of fatalities every year. It's an umbrella term for a range of conditions affecting your heart or circulatory system including high blood pressure, strokes and coronary heart disease. Like many medical conditions, cardiovascular disease is caused by a variety of factors.
While some heart problems may be unavoidable due to your genetic makeup others could be prevented or even improved by making lifestyle changes. Diet is one such factor that we can adapt to promote heart health. And, according to one expert, there is a certain fruit we could snack on daily for this very reason, reports the Express.
Doctor Deborah Lee - from the Dr Fox Online Pharmacy, explained more about how diet can help the heart. She warned that low-density lipoprotein ("bad" cholesterol), oxidative stress and platelet aggregation (clotting) can lead to cardiovascular disease.
"Diet is extremely important in terms of cardiovascular risk as it affects these three factors," she said. "Different types of fat are ingested in the diet, as are antioxidants, which are found in large quantities in fruit and vegetables. "Antioxidants counteract the harmful effects of reactive oxygen species– but our bodies cannot make them. They must be eaten as part of the diet. What we eat, for example, a high-salt and/or a high-sugar diet can also affect the activity of platelets and their tendency to clot.".
Dr Lee has urged the public to add tomatoes to their daily meals, highlighting their health benefits. "Tomatoes contain the red pigment, lycopene which is a powerful antioxidant that can help prevent atherosclerosis (the laying down of fatty plaques in arterial walls)," she explained.
