The sweet treat that fights heart disease

the-sweet-treat-that-fights-heart-disease_300An old song maintains that a “spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,” but research at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Arkansas Children’s Nutrition Center and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences shows that there’s a sweet treat that helps heart disease go down.

And you don’t need sugar to help sweeten this healthy fruit.

The laboratory research provides evidence that blueberries can help prevent harmful plaques or lesions, symptomatic of atherosclerosis, from increasing in size in arteries.

In the test, lab animals were fed the equivalent of half a cup of blueberries daily. Lesion size, measured at two places in the aorta (an artery leading from the heart), was 39 percent and 58 percent less than that of lesions in animals whose diet did not contain blueberries.

Carl Lowe

By Carl Lowe

has written about health, fitness and nutrition for a wide range of publications including Prevention Magazine, Self Magazine and Time-Life Books. The author of more than a dozen books, he has been gluten-free since 2007.

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