Researchers from the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, UK have found that people with symptomatic asthma tend to eat less fruit and consume less vitamin C than people who don't have the disease.
To investigate, researchers compared the diets of 515 adults with asthma to 515 control participants. All study participants reported their food intake over a one-week period.
Study participants with asthma ate an average of 132 grams of fruit daily, compared to 149.1 grams for healthy controls.
Participants who ate at least 46.3 grams of citrus daily had about half the risk of having asthma with symptoms compared to those who ate no citrus fruit at all.
Researchers found that lower intake of both vitamin C and manganese were tied to an increased risk of symptomatic asthma, while symptomatic asthma patients had significantly lower levels of plasma vitamin C than healthy controls.
These findings suggest that diet may be a modifiable risk factor for the development of asthma.
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