“An apple a day keeps the doctor away”.

Guess what? The saying above may just be true! For the longest time, we’ve known (thanks to the media) that including apples in your diet has nothing but positive effects on your health. Studies have proven over and over again that apples are quite beneficial in disease prevention, weight loss, and even help with good dental hygiene.

Disease wise, extensive research has shown that including an apple a day in your healthy diet helps to lower your risk of:

• Obesity
• Lung Cancer
• Asthma
• Type II Diabetes
• Heart Disease
• Stroke
• Colon Cancer

Apples have a host of beneficial vitamins and nutrients, and are a superb source of antioxidants that aid in neutralizing free radicals and help to prevent cell damage. While apples aren’t one of the fruits (such as oranges and pineapple) that are high in Vitamin C, they contain phenolic acids and flavonoids that have the antioxidant protection equivalent to taking 1500mg of straight vitamin C. So yeah, they pack quite a punch, and the diseases above are just some of the mainstream ones they help lower your risk of developing. You can be assured that there are plenty more, and typing them out would take up several pages.

The high flavonoids count in apples is important because flavonoids prevent cholesterol from oxidizing, and also they help prevent platelets from clumping, which reduces the possibility of heart attack and stroke. Quercetin (a flavonoids) are said to reduce lung cancer and asthma symptoms by as much as 46%, and you can find all of these awesome, disease fighting compounds in one healthy apple.

The best way to obtain the benefits of apples is to eat them raw (fresh), as well as apple juice, blended fresh apples in a natural smoothie, and then dried apples and cooked apples. Cloudy apple juice is a sure sign of higher antioxidant count, and leaving the skin on an apple exponentially increases cancer fighting power – which is very important to a lot of people.

If you decide to start eating larger quantities of apples, always use best practices such as buying organic, or if you don’t buy organic ones, make sure you wash the apple to reduce the risk of eating pesticide contaminated apples.

Last but not least, eating an apple before a meal (especially a heavy meal), aids in weight loss because it fills you up, and more importantly, it reduces the amount of calories absorbed from calorie filled foods, and prevents excess bad cholesterol.