Women who said they ate two or more servings of fruit each day were less likely to be diagnosed with uterine fibroids than women who barely touched fruit, a U.S. study of more than 20,000 black women as saying. Fibroids are non-cancerous growths that don't always have symptoms, but they can be painful or cause menstrual periods to be long and heavy. They may also grow very large, in some cases causing complications with pregnancy and fertility. The study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, tracked women in their 30s for more than a decade to see if their fruit and vegetable consumption was tied to the chance they developed fibroids. Black women are up to three times more likely to get fibroids, and researchers have wondered if part of that could be explained by diet. 'These data suggest a reduced risk of uterine (fibroids) among women with a greater dietary intake of fruit and preformed vitamin A,' wrote lead researcher Lauren Wise at Boston University. The data came from the Black Women's Health Study, which starting in 1995 had participants report how often they ate a range of foods, from multiple times a day to less than once a month. Questionnaires sent every other year also asked women about any new medical diagnoses they had been given. Based on these reports, 29 percent of the 23,000 participants had a new case of uterine fibroids between 1997 and 2009.
