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Researchers in Scotland suggest that the high salicylic acid content in fruits and vegetables may explain why vegetarians suffer less heart disease and bowel cancer than meat eaters. Just what is it that gives your heart and blood vessels the benefit when you eat fruit and vegies? There's no doubt that antioxidants play an important part, but what else? Well, a study from Scotland has suggested that at least one reason could be the salicylates they contain - the aspirin-like compounds. By accident, when studying a group of normal people, the researchers found a low level of salicylic acid in their blood. Salicylic acid is what aspirin breaks down into after you absorb it. The low-level finding was puzzling, since no-one had been on aspirin. The researchers suspected diet. So they compared salicylic acid levels in three groups of people: non-vegetarians, people on low-dose aspirin because they were at risk of heart disease, and vegetarians. The results showed that indeed, vegetarians have quite high levels of salicylates in their blood - and in fact their levels overlapped with the people taking low-dose aspirin. The implication is that if you take a decent amount of fruit and vegetables in your diet, you could be getting a small amount of coronary prevention without the gastric side effects of aspirin. This is advice which is still based on theory rather than proven fact. So if you're already on low-dose aspirin because you're at high risk, you wouldn't replace it with vegetables, just supplement. But for the rest of us, it's a natural and mostly palatable form of prevention.
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