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Greens may stop wheezing

 The asthma epidemic among children may have been triggered by youngsters not eating their greens. Increasing affluence has led to many consuming a diet that has more processed food than fresh vegetables.

Now researchers claim that a lack of key vitamins and minerals in the diet may be responsible for the rising levels of asthma in Britain and other Western countries.

In Britain a million children have the condition which is more common among youngsters here than almost anywhere else in the world, affecting up to one in three teenagers.

The scientists studied communities in Saudi Arabia where there are striking differences in lifestyle and the rate of allergies across the country.

More than 100 children aged around 12 with asthma symptoms, who lived in the city of Jeddah and several villages, were compared with 200 non-asthmatic children.

Diet was significantly linked to wheeziness in the children with asthma. Those children with most symptoms had the lowest intakes of vegetables, milk and fibre, vitamin E, calcium, magnesium, sodium and potassium.

Children whose diets were relatively low in vegetables and vitamin E intake were around three times more likely to wheeze.

The researchers, from Aberdeen University and King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, said the Saudi diet was traditionally based on Arabic foods that bore little resemblance to the Western diet.

'However, with increasing prosperity and commercial exposure, there has been an influx over some three decades of Western-type frozen and prepared foods in supermarkets and restaurants,' they added.

In recent years experts have claimed that the explosion in asthma has happened because children's lives are 'too clean'. They say previous generations were exposed to more dirt - and the microorganisms in it - which helped their immune systems develop resistance to allergies and related conditions.

But the researchers said there was no link between numbers of infections children suffered and levels of wheeziness.

Dr Martyn Partridge, chief medical adviser to the National Asthma Campaign, said: 'This study is consistent with others that suggest that taking fresh fruit and a balanced diet protects against asthma and some other lung diseases. 'It is yet another pointer towards lifestyle as the cause of the increase in prevalence of asthma.'

Dr Neil Barnes, a specialist at the London Chest Hospital, said there was stronger evidence for infections rather than diet being responsible for rising asthma levels. 'But it may turn out that different factors are responsible in different communities,' he added.