Coronavirus: eating more cabbage and cucumber might reduce death rate, European study says
- Increasing average daily consumption of the vegetables by 1 gram may cut mortality rate, according to research, which has not been peer-reviewed
- Lettuce could have the opposite effect, preliminary study finds
There could be a link between coronavirus death rates and eating certain vegetables, according to a preliminary study in Europe.
It suggested that increasing the average consumption of cabbage or cucumber by 1 gram a day could reduce a country’s mortality rate by 13.6 per cent or 15.7 per cent, respectively.
But lettuce could potentially have the opposite effect, while other vegetables did not show any expected disease-fighting benefits, according to the researchers led by Jean Bousquet, a professor of pulmonary medicine at Montpellier University in France.
The study, which has not been peer-reviewed, was limited to Europe, and the researchers cautioned that the results could have been affected by uncertainties such as deaths being counted differently in some countries, but it was the “first attempt to link death rates with food consumption”.
“Nutrition should not be overlooked” as a factor behind Covid-19 deaths, said Bousquet, former chairman of the WHO Global Alliance against Chronic Respiratory Diseases, and colleagues in the paper posted on preprint server medRxiv.org on Saturday.
