April 12, 2011

TORONTO (Canadian Press) -- The conventional wisdom about an apple a day keeping the doctor away is getting some added heft from a study presented Tuesday at a conference in Washington.

A researcher at Florida State University presented his findings on 160 women aged 45 to 65 who were randomly assigned to eat 75 grams of dried apples or 100 grams of prunes each day for a year.

Bahram Arjmandi says that to his surprise, the women assigned to eat the dried apples had a 23 per cent decrease in their LDL cholesterol -- that's the bad cholesterol -- within six months.

The study presented at the Experimental Biology conference also found the HDL, or good, cholesterol levels rose a bit for the women eating apples, in the area of three to four per cent.

As well, Arjmandi says the women lost on average 3.3 pounds.

A spokesperson for the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, Dr. Andreas Wielgosz, says it's preliminary information that still needs to be validated and confirmed, but he also calls it intriguing and welcome news.