More Magnesium in our Diet Means less Chance of a Stroke

Many of us have been told as a child by our parents to eat our greens even though children don’t often have a great liking for them, and new evidence suggesting that more magnesium in our diet means less chance of a stroke, does confirm this age old adage.

It is true that green vegetables of all sorts are good for our health, containing as they do, a whole lot of fibre, plus various vitamins, minerals and antioxidants that help to make us function efficiently and fight off old age.

Our physiology is extremely complicated and new links between health benefits and foods are being found all the time but one of the latest has to do with magnesium which is quite plentiful in  green, leafy vegetables like  kale, spinach, and collards.

You will read here that:

 “A fresh look at past research concludes that people who eat lots of greens and other foods rich in magnesium have fewer strokes — a finding that supports current diet guidelines.”

“What the results do suggest is that people should eat a healthy diet with “magnesium-rich foods such as green leafy vegetables, nuts, beans and whole grains,” said lead author Susanna Larsson, a professor at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.”

“Larsson and her colleagues combed through research databases spanning the last 45 years to find studies that tracked how much magnesium people ate and how many of them had a stroke over time.”

“For every extra 100 milligrams of magnesium a person ate per day, their risk of an ischemic stroke — the most common kind, typically caused by a blood clot — fell by nine per cent. The median magnesium intake for U.S. men and women included in the analysis was 242 milligrams a day (mg/d). The U.S. recommends men and women over age 31 eat 420 and 320 mg/d of magnesium, respectively.”

Studies like this confirm what we know already that a diet rich in vegetables and fruit is more in line with the sort of diet our primitive ancestors would have eaten and is the mainstay of that eaten by Mediterranean peoples today with their relative longevity and freedom from certain “civilised” diseases like heart attack and stroke.

Some lean meat and fish is essential to a balanced diet but eating green vegetables gives us more important vitamins and minerals. More magnesium in our diet means less chance of a stroke and heart disease, and this is just of many ways that fresh fruit and vegetables benefit us.