Healthy diet can help ease asthma symptoms: study

Melbourne: A healthy diet could help ease asthma symptoms, according to a new Australian study. According to a report of Australia's public broadcaster ABC, two studies, explaining that people on high saturated fats food diet were likely than others to have Asthama attacks, will be presented to a Thoracic Society conference in Adelaide today.

In the study, the scientists found saturated fats reduce

the effectiveness of the medicines used to treat Asthma. Nutritional biochemist at the University of Newcastle, Lisa Wood, said 'the researching team wanted to highlight the benefits of eating healthy foods to people with Asthma.

"The team had developed a scorecard of good and bad foods, which she hoped asthmatics would use to guide their eating," she said. "It's never going to replace Asthma medications but nonetheless, because of the beneficial health effects that we've seen, we really do promote this as a healthy way to change your lifestyle which will improve asthma but also which will improve your overall health status," she said.

"We've seen that fruit and vegetables can be very helpful, so if you have a diet that's high in fruit and vegetables compared with a diet that's low in fruit and vegetables that reduces your risk of having an Asthma attack.

"However, more research was required to examine if poor diet could be a risk factor for developing asthma," she said. "Some big population studies have suggested that dietary factors can lead to the development of Asthma but there isn't really a lot of strong interventional data to support that at the moment, that's another area that needs further research," she said.