Nutritional Quality and Effect on Disease Prevention of Vegetables

摘要

Vegetables have remarkable nutritional and health benefits. There are good reasons to include vegetables in human diet since they are enriched in bioactive compounds and by this reason they may help reduce the risk of some diseases. In this paper it was analyzed the nutrition quality and effect on disease prevention of vegetables. Each vegetable family and each vegetable contain a unique combination of bioactive compounds. The health benefit of vegetables should not be linked to one type of vegetable. It is presented some experimental research evidences that vegetables exert anti-oxidative, anti-carcinogenic, anti-diabetic and cardiovascular disease lowering effects. The mechanism by which vegetable bioactive compounds decrease the risk of some of these diseases is complex and sometimes unknown.