A diet rich in vegetables has undoubted health benefits, but a new study released Monday suggests that it does not reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Bristol (UK) and the University of Hong Kong (China) found no evidence that eating vegetables was effective in preventing this type of disease and assumed that previous studies leading in this direction had not taken it into account. socioeconomic factors and lifestyle.

The new study, published today in the journal “Frontiers in Nutrition”, suggests that it is “unlikely” that higher consumption of vegetables, cooked or raw, has an impact on cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk.

The researchers drew their analysis from data stored in the large-scale UK Biobank study, which tracked the health of half a million adults in the UK who voluntarily signed up for the program between 2006 and 2010 and who were regularly asked about their diet, lifestyle. , and medical history.

“The UK Biobank is a large-scale prospective study of how genetics and the environment contribute to the development of the most common and deadly diseases,” said Naomi Allen, the program’s chief scientist and co-author of the study, in a statement.

“We used detailed, long-term and large follow-up information from the Biobank on social and lifestyle factors to assess the association between vegetable intake and CVD risk,” he added.

For the study, the experts used responses from 399,586 participants – of whom 4.5% developed CVD – about their vegetable consumption and correlated it with other factors that might influence it, such as physical exercise and socioeconomic status.

They found that the risk of death from CVD was 15% lower among those with the highest vegetable intake than in the segment with the lowest intake.

However, the note shows, “this apparent effect is substantially weakened when other possible socioeconomic, nutritional and medical factors are taken into account.”

Introducing these factors reduced the predictive power of vegetable intake by up to 80%, indicating their importance in the overall analysis.

“Our study found no evidence of a protective effect of vegetable consumption on CVD. In contrast, our analysis suggests that the apparent protective effect of vegetables is very likely to diverge from other factors,” said Qi Feng, an Oxford researcher and lead author of the study.