Milk, fruits and vegetables could reduce disability risk

09/02/05 There may be more reason than ever to drink your milk and eat your fruits and vegetables. A Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center researcher and colleagues have reported that high consumption of dairy products and fruits and vegetables may lower the risk of disability, especially among black women.

The research, in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that black women who consumed the highest amounts of dairy products and fruits and vegetables - close to the amounts recommended by the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans - had at least a 30 percent lower risk of disability than participants who consumed the lowest amounts of these foods.

And, among all participants, eating more of these foods was associated with lower risk for functional limitations, such as being unable to walk a quarter of a mile or climb 10 steps, that often precede disability.

Houston, who completed the study while she was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said the findings are important because the number of disabled elderly is expected to triple between 1985 and 2050. About half of people over age 65 will become disabled enough to require some nursing home care.

The researchers believe this is the first study to report on an association between disability and eating certain foods. For the project, they evaluated data from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities ( ARIC ) study, which included about 16,000 randomly selected participants in Forsyth County, Jackson, Miss., Hagerstown, Md., and suburban Minneapolis, Minn. People who had chronic disease and were likely to already be disabled were excluded.

Wake Forest Baptist is an academic health system comprised of North Carolina Baptist Hospital and Wake Forest University Health Sciences, which operates the university's School of Medicine. The system comprises 1,282 acute care, psychiatric, rehabilitation and long-term care beds and is consistently ranked as one of "America's Best Hospitals" by U.S. News & World Report.

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