10 facts about superfoods

1. Two apples a day can reduce cholesterol by ten percent.
2. Eating at least three servings of fruits, vegetables, and salads daily can half your risk of heart and circulatory disease.
3. Eating one portion of any of the cabbage family daily significantly reduces the risk of lung, colon, and breast cancer.
4. Two portions a week of spinach, sorrel or beet tops reduces the risk of adult macular degeneration (AMD) by fifty percent.
5. The equivalent of six ripe tomatoes daily -- whole fruit, purée, sauce, soup, ketchup, sun-dried or juice -- halves the risk of prostate cancer in men and helps prevent blood clots and high blood pressure.
6. One clove of garlic daily reduces cholesterol and makes the blood less sticky, preventing blood clots.
7. Southern Europeans get twice as much of their energy (ten percent) than people in North America (four-and-a-half percent) from the protective fruit and vegetable superfoods.
8. The Mediterranean diet, with its high level of superfoods, means less disease and longer life expectancy; for example, Greeks have the lowest amount of bowel cancer in the whole of Europe.
9. Vitamin pills are not a substitute for superfoods. All the studies using pills to replicate the benefits of the Mediterranean diet for heart disease have failed.
10. Superfoods explain "the French Paradox:" a diet of cheese, pâté, sausage, wine, and cigarettes but with massive intakes of superfoods means that the average French person has a sixty percent lower risk of premature death from heart disease than his or her equivalent in the UK.