Health
Does an apple a day really keep the doctor away?
The proverbial advice to eat an apple a day first appeared in print in 1866.
A study tells us that the “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” aphorism was coined in 1913 but was based on the original form with a different rhyme, some 149 years ago in Wales: “Eat an apple on going to bed and you’ll keep the doctor from earning his bread,” went the proverb in Pembrokeshire.
The University of Michigan School of Nursing researchers in Ann Arbor believe giving such medical proverbs an empirical evaluation “may allow us to profit from the wisdom of our predecessors.”
For the study’s measure of keeping the doctor away, Matthew Davis, PhD, and co-authors evaluated an outcome of no more than one visit a year to the doctor as a means of investigating the proverb’s success in daily apple eaters compared with non-apple eaters.
So did a daily apple succeed in keeping the doctor away? No, it did not. There was no statistically meaningful difference in visits to the doctor for daily apple eaters in the analysis. But the study did find that an apple a day kept the pharmacist away.