On your doctor’s advice, you take a regular or baby aspirin every day to ward off heart-attack-causing blood clots. That’s good. But then you have an argument… or a fender-bender … or a speech to give. Uh-oh. Your body starts pumping the stress hormone adrenaline … and a new study suggests that, at that point, aspirin is not as effective and may let you down.
Fortunately, that same study found something that won’t stop working when the going gets tough: flavonoids, ingredients in onions, apples, When a group of monkeys taking flavonoid supplements got a dose of stress hormone, their blood kept flowing smoothly. When monkeys taking aspirin got the same dose of stress hormone, they went form forming no clots back to forming clots again (Abstract, American Heart Association Annual Meeting, Anaheim, California, November 1995).
If other studies pan out, scientist John Folts, Ph.D., of the University of Wisconsin Medical School, Madison, predicts that flavonoid supplements may be standard treatment for heart patients–“possibly in the very near future.” Dr. Folts discovered the benefits of aspirin for heart patients over 20 years ago, so his prediction carries extra weight. Till there’s more research (we’ll follow this story), diets high in flavonoids are the way to go.
