Drinking a glass of orange juice each day may cut the risk of deadly strokes by almost a quarter, a major study suggests.
Volunteers who downed a juice a day saw their risk of a brain clot drop by 24 per cent, according to the decade-long trial.
Researchers in the Netherlands say it's not just orange juice that has the benefit, other fruit juices also appear to cut the risk.
Fresh fruit juices have long been thought of as healthy. But consumers in recent years have been put off by warnings over their high sugar content.
As a result, UK sales have fallen steadily from a peak in 2011 of over one billion litres a year to just under 900m in 2017. But the latest study suggests the health benefits in terms of stroke prevention could outweigh the risks from sugar content.
The European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition is a major long-running study investigating the influence of diet on a wide range of illnesses.
Scientists at the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, in Bilthoven, tracked nearly 35,000 men and women aged between 20 and 70 for almost 15 years. They looked at how self-reported consumption of fruit juices compared with the numbers of strokes over that period.
Their results, published in the British Journal of Nutrition, showed four to eight glasses a week of orange or any other fruit juice cut stroke risk by almost a quarter.
