Eating vegetables does not prevent cardiovascular disease, large study finds

Adequate vegetable intake is important to maintain a balanced diet and avoid various diseases

It seems plausible at first glance that vegetable consumption may reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, since components in vegetables such as carotenoids and alpha-tocopherol have cardiovascular disease-preventing properties

Now, new results from a powerful, large-scale new study in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition suggest that consuming cooked or undercooked vegetables is unlikely to affect cardiovascular disease risk

"The UK Biobank is a large-scale prospective study examining how genes and the environment contribute to the development of the most common and deadly diseases

The UK Biobank tracks the health of half a million UK adults by linking to their medical records

The researchers used responses from a registered 399,586 participants, 4.

Crucially, the researchers also assessed the potential role of "residual confounding," that is, whether unknown additional factors or inaccurate measurements of known factors might contribute to the relationship between cardiovascular disease risk and vegetable intake.

The average daily intake of vegetables, raw vegetables and cooked vegetables was 5.

Dr Qi Feng, a research fellow at Oxford University's Nuffield Department of Population Health and lead author of the study, said: "Our large study found no evidence of a protective effect of vegetable intake on cardiovascular disease

Feng et al.

The final author, Associate Professor Dr Ben Lacey from the University of Oxford, concluded: "This is an important study that contributes to understanding the dietary causes of cardiovascular disease and how the burden of cardiovascular disease is often driven by vegetable intake.

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Raw and cooked vegetable consumption and risk of cardiovascular disease: a study of 400,000 adults in UK Biobank