Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
We’ve all heard the saying “an apple a day keeps the doctor away,” but researchers from the University of Michigan and the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice put the maxim to the test and discovered that it’s not necessarily true.
In research published online this week in JAMA Internal Medicine, Dr. Matthew Davis of the UM School of Nursing and his colleagues found that on average, frequent apple eaters made just as many trips to the doctor as those who said that they ate less or none of the fruit.
Getting to the, ahem, core of the maxim
According to the Associated Press, Dr. Davis and his fellow researchers reviewed data on roughly 8,400 American adults who participated in government health surveys in 2007-2008 and 2009-2010. One of the questions they answered pertained to the foods they had consumed over the past 24 hours, as well as medical care they sought throughout the previous year.
About nine percent of adults ate the equivalent of at least one small apple each day, while nearly one-third said that they had visited the doctor no more than once in the previous 12 months. The analysis revealed that apple eaters had slightly fewer visits than those that shunned the popular produce, but that difference vanished then they accounted for other factors (including the weight, race, education level and insurance status) than can affect frequency of doctor’s visits.
So how did this fascinating study come about? “We were working on a serious project looking at identifying food sources of toxic metals in American’s diet when we realized had the ability to identify apple eaters,” Dr. Davis told redOrbit via e-mail (that paper was published in the journal PLOS One last September). “Our paper is a tongue-in-cheek literal look at the proverb.”
Health and doctor visits are as different as apples and oranges
Dr. Davis told redOrbit that it wasn’t his intention to prove that eating fruit was good for you.
“We did not examine the effect of apple consumption on health. Other papers have done this, and there is a lot of evidence of the beneficial aspects of apple,” he explained. For instance, as the AP notes, the fruit is a good source of vitamin C, provides nearly one-fifth of the recommended daily amount of fiber and contains trace amounts of vitamin A, calcium and iron.
“However, health and healthcare use are two different things,” Dr. Davis added. “In addition to managing illness, people use healthcare to stay well. Thus, apple eating could be associated with more or less healthcare visits as people who eat apples likely seek preventive measures.”
“Frankly, we thought it would be fun to try to examine the proverb literally (even just to see if it could be done),” he went on to tell redOrbit. “Perhaps, our study will encourage others to have a little fun examining such proverbs that are imbedded in our culture.”
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