Cyclospora Outbreak Update: A Doctor’s Advice About Eating Your Fruits & Vegetables Family Health Men's Health Women's Health Kids' Health Eating for Two Safety Nutrition

Cyclospora is an intestinal parasite that can come from raw fruits and vegetables. The current Cyclospora outbreak widely covered in the media, though, is nothing new.

Cyclospora outbreaks have occurred in the U.S. every year for decades. It is not passed from person to person but rather comes from consuming contaminated produce. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notes that the current outbreak has 1,645 confirmed U.S. cases of cyclophorias with 5,100 cases that require further testing.

Although this is much more than previous years, and many cases have likely been missed, this still translates to only one case per 40,000 Americans, even if all the above tests come back positive. Although there have been about 141 hospitalizations from dehydration in very vulnerable people, no deaths are expected.

My concern is that people will overreact and avoid vegetables altogether, which is absolutely ill-advised. The Standard American Diet (aptly called SAD!) is low in nutrition and high in added sugar and responsible for many of our leading illnesses including Type II diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, and even many cancers.

A study published in Frontiers in Nutrition found that eating your raw veggies (but NOT cooked ones) is associated with a 15 percent lower risk of heart attack death and 13 percent lower risk of overall death. A meta-analysis of 26 cohort studies published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation showed that higher daily intake of fruits and vegetables was associated with lower mortality.

Research presented at Nutrition 2019, hosted by The American Society for Nutrition, estimated that an adequate fruit and vegetable intake would contribute to millions of preventable deaths from heart attack and stroke each year.

Common sense should prevail. Make sure to thoroughly wash whole fruits and vegetables before eating and remember that raw veggies have been shown to be more protective against many diseases than cooked veggies. Also worth noting: Early animal research even suggests that increasing curcumin intake (the primary active compound in turmeric and curry) may dramatically speed the elimination of the Cyclospora parasite.

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