Which green vegetables cure diseases but cause interactions when taking medicine?

Choosing to buy vegetables and fruits - Illustration photo

Vegetables have many health benefits

Dr. Duong Ngoc Van, Melatec Hospital, said that vegetables, especially green leafy vegetables, contain many essential nutrients and bring many health benefits. Some of the great benefits they bring are as follows:

- Providing fiber : Using green leafy vegetables helps you provide a rich amount of fiber for the body, preventing constipation.

- Improve eyesight : Green vegetables are rich in antioxidants and vitamins. Therefore, they are good for eyesight, help improve eye health, protect the macula of the eye, and prevent the effects of blue light that can harm the "windows to the soul".

At the same time, it helps prevent the risk of eye diseases such as cataracts or macular degeneration.

- Helps bones stay healthy : Green leafy vegetables also contain a lot of calcium and vitamin K. Therefore, they help bones and teeth stay healthy, strengthen bones and improve bone density, making bones thicker and stronger.

- Regulate blood pressure : Using green vegetables daily can help the body maintain stable blood pressure as well as healthy cholesterol levels.

- Good for the skin : With many antioxidants contained in the nutritional composition, green vegetables help slow down the aging process, maintaining youthful skin. Eating green vegetables also helps you provide vitamin C to the body, maintaining the firmness and plumpness of the skin.

- Weight loss support: Green vegetables contain many essential nutrients that are good for the body but contain few calories. Therefore, this is a food that helps support effective weight loss and control body weight.

- Detoxification : Our bodies more or less accumulate toxins that have not been digested and broken down. Green vegetables have the effect of breaking down toxins accumulated in the body, which is beneficial for "cleansing" the blood and detoxifying.

- Regulates the acid and alkaline balance in the body : In daily meals, we often use a lot of foods of animal origin such as fish, meat, eggs, animal organs... which are foods that contain a lot of sulfur and phosphorus, the body's metabolism appears to be acidic, which is not good for health.

Meanwhile, because green vegetables contain many trace elements such as potassium, sodium, calcium, magnesium..., the body produces many alkaline substances. Therefore, eating a lot of green vegetables can help balance acid and alkali in the body, which is beneficial for health.

Vegetables should be washed thoroughly before cooking and should not interact with medications - Illustration photo

Be careful of green vegetables that are incompatible with toxic chemicals.

Doctor Cao Hong Phuc, Military Hospital 103, said that green vegetables are essential for the body, but there are some types that are incompatible with medicine. If we do not know, it can be life-threatening when we are taking medicine and eat these vegetables.

- Taking heart failure medication while eating watercress can easily lead to poisoning.

In the early stages of treatment, the combination of watercress and anti-heart failure drugs can increase the effectiveness of treatment because it reduces edema in patients, a common symptom of heart failure. However, medical monitoring is very necessary.

But when using drugs for a long time, the free combination of these two things should be considered because otherwise it can easily cause the risk of drug toxicity. The simple reason is that watercress can easily lower blood potassium levels. Low blood potassium increases the risk of anti-heart failure drug toxicity because potassium is an electrolyte that helps regulate the effects.

When using watercress freely, the strong diuretic effect of this food can lower the concentration of potassium in the blood. That makes it very difficult to regulate the effect of the drug, easily causing the risk of poisoning.

Therefore, without a doctor's control of dosage and low potassium threshold, it is best for patients not to combine on their own. When wanting to use watercress, it must be used at least 4 hours away from the time of taking medication.

- Anticoagulants say no to cauliflower and cabbage

Anticoagulants are drugs that inhibit abnormal blood clotting in the blood vessels, preventing blood clots from forming or from increasing in size.

Some types of patients who must use this group of drugs are people with cerebral infarction, myocardial infarction, people with heart valve disease, rheumatic heart disease. Even organ transplant patients must use anticoagulants.

When taking anticoagulants, do not eat cauliflower or other vegetables in the same family such as broccoli, cabbage, kale, lettuce, collard greens, beets, etc.

Taking medication at the same time or close to the time of eating these vegetables will completely lose its effect. Because anticoagulants have the effect of prolonging blood clotting time, while cauliflower, cabbage... increase the clotting speed, shortening blood clotting time.

- Eating cabbage and taking iron pills is better than not taking them.

Iron is an extremely necessary trace element for the body to produce blood. Iron is considered a tonic for pregnant mothers, people who have just recovered from illness, people with anemia, malnutrition... The absorption characteristics of iron tablets depend a lot on the amount of fiber in the food.

Eating a lot of vegetables and fruits, the amount of fiber entering the body will reduce the absorption of iron in the intestine. Cabbage is a vegetable with a high fiber content. If you eat a lot of cabbage, it is considered as trying to make the iron excreted. So, drinking and then eating is really taking medicine and using iron excretion at the same time.

Therefore, if you are recovering from an illness or have been prescribed iron tablets by your doctor, you should eliminate cabbage from your diet. You should switch from high-fiber vegetables like cabbage to lower-fiber vegetables like chayote, kohlrabi, etc.

If you still want to eat cabbage, you should choose the solution of taking iron pills 4 hours after eating. At that time, the fiber has left the stomach and small intestine, so it does not hinder the absorption of iron. Along with the group of foods that are forbidden like cabbage are water spinach, celery, and mustard greens.

Ideally, adults should eat an average of 300 - 400g of fresh vegetables per day in 2 main meals, prepared by boiling, cooking in soup or stir-frying with a little oil with meat or fish.

You should change 3-5 types of seasonal vegetables every day such as various types of cabbage, water spinach, amaranth, jute, Malabar spinach, squash, sweet potato leaves, cabbage, kohlrabi, cauliflower, radish, etc.

To eat raw, you should only use salad greens, lettuce, herbs (but they must be washed carefully) and thinly sliced ​​banana flowers, jicama, bean sprouts (should be blanched in boiling water to reduce the pungency)...

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/rau-xanh-nao-chua-benh-nhung-gay-tuong-tac-khi-uong-thuoc-20240929212150244.htm