Potassium to the Rescue

Avocados And Bananas In Diet May Help Prevent Heart Disease

Scientists find that high-potassium foods protect the arteries against hardening or calcification. Such beneficial food items include avocados and bananas. It's undeniable that avocados are in trend of late. In fact, earlier this year, health practitioners warned avocado lovers of a condition called avocado hand where individuals sustain hand injuries from improperly preparing the fruit.

 From article, (scientists used apoliprotein E-deficient mice or mice that are prone to cardiovascular disease when fed with a high-fat diet. What researchers did was feed the said mice with high, normal, and low-potassium diets.

Results show that the mice fed with low-potassium diets yielded significant vascular calcification and increased aortal stiffening compared with the mice fed with normal-potassium diets. On the other hand, the mice fed with high-potassium diets showed significantly inhibited vascular calcification and aortal stiffness.

Essentially, the mice fed with low-potassium diets had harder arteries, while mice fed with high-potassium diets had more flexible arteries.

A Cardiovascular Health Study of over 4,000 men and women showed that 79.9 percent of individuals aged 65 or older develop arterial calcification, a predictor of cardiovascular events. Heart disease is the leading cause of death for both men and women in the United States, and about 610,000 people die from it every year.

The results of the study show that increasing or even maintaining a healthy amount of potassium in regular diets could play important roles in preventing vascular complications. Further, it could prove useful in potential therapies and treatments for arterial treatments and atherosclerotic vascular calcification.

The study has been published in JCI Insight.)

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