 Regular apple consumption may contribute to a lower risk of dying prematurely. Moderate apple consumption, meaning like an apple tour a week, was associated with a 20% lower risk of dying from all causes put together, whereas those who ate an apple a day had a 35% lower risk. You'll often hear me talking about a lower or higher risk of mortality. What does that mean? I mean, isn't the risk of dying 100% for everyone eventually? Let's look at some survival curves to help visualize. If you follow thousands of older women over time, for example, you might see a survival curve like this. They all start out alive, but over a period of 15 years, nearly half succumb. Okay, but this is the survival curve of those who rarely, if ever, ate apples less than 20 a year. Those averaging more than like a half a small apple a day instead fell off like this. Over the same time period, closer to only about 40% died, and those who ate an apple a day, one small apple, or about a quarter of a large apple a day, did even better survive even longer. Why is that the case? It seems to be less the apples of ones eye than the apple of ones arteries. Even a fraction of an apple a day is associated with a 24% lower odds of having severe major artery calcifications, a marker of vascular disease. And if you're like, duh, it's a fruit, of course it's healthy. The effect was not found for pears, oranges, or bananas. Both these studies were done on women, but a similar effect was found for men, for apples and onions. We think because of the flavonoids naturally occurring phytonutrients concentrated in apples, thought to improve artery function and lower blood pressure leading to improvements in blood flow throughout your body and brain, thereby decreasing the risk of heart disease and strokes. But you don't know until you put it to the test. When I first saw this paper on testing flavonoid-rich apples, I assumed they had selectively bred or genetically engineered some special apple, but no. The high flavonoid apple was just an apple with its peel on, compared to the low flavonoid apple, which was just the exact same apple, but with the peel removed. Over the next three hours, flavonoid levels in the bloodstream shot up in the unpeeled apple group, compared to the peeled apple group, which coincided with significantly improved artery function, peeled versus unpeeled. They conclude that the lower risk of cardiovascular disease with higher apple consumption is most likely due to the high concentration of flavonoids in the skin, which improve artery function. Though it could be anything in the peel, all we know is that apple peels are particularly good for us, improving artery function and lowering blood pressure. Even compared to spinach, I mean give someone about three quarters of a cup of cooked spinach, and within two to three hours their blood pressure drops. Instead, eat an apple with some extra peel thrown in, and you get a similar effect. The researchers conclude that apples and spinach almost immediately improve artery function and lower blood pressure. What's nice about these results is that we're talking about whole foods, not some supplement or extract, so this could easily translate into a natural low-cost method of reducing the cardiovascular risk profile of the general population. I've got more videos coming out on other natural low-cost methods for preventing and treating our leading killers, so keep your eyes peeled, but keep your apples unpeeled.