Hello, I'm Monica Reinagle, and you're listening to The Nutrition Diva Podcast Welcome.

A curious listener, who may or may not have been my scientist sister, Hype Ham, recently

forwarded me a headline that caught her attention.

Eating vegetables does not protect against cardiovascular disease finds large-scale study.

I thought your readers might come across this and would want to hear your take, she wrote to me,

at least I do. Now just for context, this story was not on some clickbait site, but on the

blog of Frontiers. This is a respected science technology platform and publisher, and the headline

does faithfully reflect the conclusion of the authors who found that higher vegetable consumption

was not associated with a reduced risk of heart disease or overall mortality. This analysis

was done on dietary and health records collected as part of the UK Biobank study, which involves

almost 400,000 people. So these findings are correlations only. They do not prove cause and effect.

However, the more expensive and difficult research that's needed to prove cause and effect often

starts with exactly this type of observational finding. Now interestingly, in this study,

the authors looked at the effects of cooked and raw vegetables separately,

is one form more protective than the other, and they found that cooked vegetable consumption was

not associated at all with cardiovascular disease or mortality, but that people who ate more raw

vegetables were somewhat less likely to develop heart disease or die. Now, proponents of a raw

diet might be tempted to seize on this as evidence that cooking destroys the healthful properties of

foods and that raw foods are more nourishing. And I don't agree with this view. For one thing,

raw vegetables can lose up to half of their original nutritional value simply by sitting in your

counter for two days or even in your refrigerator for two weeks. Although cooking does involve some

nutrient losses, a vegetable that's cooked on the day that it's harvested could end up retaining

...