A group of researchers after a recent study has disclosed that women, irrelevant of whether they have cardiovascular diseases or not, if carry on consuming antioxidant rich diet experience a reduced stroke risk.

Oxidative stress can be defined as an inconsistency between the generation of some kind of free radicals that generally damages cell and the functionality of human body to deactivate those radicals to prevent cell damage. As a result of the inconsistency many internal problems like inflammation, blood vessel damage and stiffening begin to happen.

The researchers have claimed that Vit-C, Vit-E, carotenoids and flavonoids are 4 such antioxidants that can put full stop to oxidative stress and inflammation by destroying the free radicals. Besides destroying the free radicals, one of the antioxidants namely the flavonoids also helps in developing endothelial function in body and cutting down the levels of Blood pressure, inflammation and Blood clotting.

The lead author of the study Susanne Rautiainen has claimed that consuming antioxidant rich diet decreases the oxidative stress and stress which in turn reduces the risk of having stroke. That is why she has suggested people to include lots of colorful and fresh fruits and vegetables in their diet chart because fruits and vegetables are rich sources of various types of antioxidants.

For the study the researchers selected 31,035 women who did not have heart diseases and 5,680 women who had heart diseases. Those women were aged between 49 years of age to 83 years of age. The researchers observed the heart diseases free women for 11.5 years and heart-diseases affected women for 9.6 years in an average. They found the 1,322 heart diseases free women and 1,007 heart diseases affected women got stroke. They collected the dietary data of those women and found that those who had antioxidant rich diet had 17 per cent less chances of stroke than who did not eat antioxidant.

The study was appeared in Journal of the American Heart Association.