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Food

An Apple a Day Doesn't Do Shit

An actual study published by an esteemed medical journal has concluded that your daily Red Delicious does not, in fact, keep the doctor away.

Apples are delicious. They're worthy of our admiration, and perhaps even meditation. But they are not a substitute for the hour and a half you spend getting prodded, groped, and reprimanded for your poor lifestyle choices during your annual physical exam.

Of course, anyone with even a passing understanding of nutrition and human physiology could surmise that there's nothing especially magical in apples—except maybe quercetin for vascular health, or fiber for squeaky-clean bowels.

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READ: This Apple Historian Wants You to Meditate on Your Fruit

And yet an actual study published by JAMA Internal Medicine—an esteemed medical journal published by the American Medical Association—set out to test that nugget of common wisdom: an apple a day keeps the doctor away.

Cliff's Notes version: It's all bullshit.

The researchers surveyed more than 8,700 US adults about their dietary habits and their frequency of doctor visits. As far as their definitions went, "keeping the doctor away" meant no more than one visit to a physician in the past year. (They also took hospital stays, visits to shrinks, and prescription meds into account.)

Interestingly, only 9 percent of the respondents qualified as daily apple-eaters, and they tended to be from a racial or ethnic minority, had a higher educational attainment, and were less likely to smoke.

Initially, it would appear that apple-eaters do benefit from their daily Red Delicious: 39 percent of apple-eaters were successful in avoiding doctor visits, as opposed to versus 33.9 percent for those who don't eat apples daily.

But when the researchers adjusted for "sociodemographic and health-related characteristics," they found no statistically significant different between the apple-eaters and the non-apple-eaters.

The only upshot? Apple-eaters were slightly more likely to avoid prescriptions—but who knows if that's because they thought their apples were benefitting them more than their thyroid medication.

For what it's worth, JAMA Internal Medicine's editor, Rita F. Redberg, noted that this was the publication's first April Fools issue: "We look forward to continued editorial chuckles as you send us scientifically rigorous and humorous content that will educate and entertain us all," she wrote. In an email to Forbes, Redberg added that the findings of the study shouldn't be discounted, and that "a study could be scientifically rigorous and still have some humor or light side, as this one did."

So, does that mean you should pile on the candy bars and throw the fruit out the window? Probably not—but the research certainly doesn't say anything bad about a beer a day, either.