An Apple A Day Does (Kinda) Keep The Doctor Away

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away” extols the benefits of healthy living, using the common household fruit as an example to say, “eat well and you will have fewer reasons to visit the doctor.”

Simple enough.

While no one actually thinks eating one apple a day is the single way to a healthy life, apples have lived in our collective consciousness as the poster-fruit of healthy living for as long as such concepts like ‘healthy living’ have existed.

But why apples? Why not pears, watermelons, bananas or figs?

The history bit

Well, starting with the expression itself, it dates back to an 1866 Welsh magazine Notes and Queries, but under a different form:

“Eat an apple on going to bed, And you’ll keep the doctor from earning his bread.”

The modern version popped up in writing for the first time half a century later in 1922, and hasn’t changed since. In the grand scheme of things, this is a relatively modern expression then, especially considering how long apples have been around (more on that in a bit).

But while the proverb is a modern one, the perceived benefits of eating apples have existed as long as you could imagine. Humans have been eating apples for some 10,000 years (or a form of apples anyway, albeit far different in appearance to what we consider apples today), and they’ve been part of our culture since the beginning.

Think of an apple in history and your mind might take you all the way back to Eve in the Garden of Eden, munching that fateful apple that doomed us all to a life of sin and suffering.

And interestingly enough, the ‘location’ of the Garden of Eden (typically pinpointed in the Asia Minor region — the south of modern day Iraq) is where the first modern, recognisable apples are found in history. By 2000 BC they had reached the Mediterranean, and by around 900–800 BC Homer was writing about them in his Odyssey.

So it’s safe to say that apples are deeply ingrained in our minds and diets by this point. No wonder a proverb about them has lasted over 150 years.

But let’s come back to the expression itself, looking at it literally, and the suggestion that eating one of the sweet little suckers keeps you from visiting your doctor or getting sick: how true is that?

The science bit

Well, let’s look at the nutritional benefits first.

A typical 100 gram apple is about 86% water (the rest mostly carbohydrates), gives us around 52 calories of energy, a bit of fiber, and not a whole lot more in terms of micronutrients. Looking at this from a modern lens, apples seem wholly unremarkable.

Of course, our ancient foraging ancestors didn’t have the luxury of popping out to the shop and filling a trolley with a variety of fruits, vegetables, meats and pulses for a well balanced diet. They took what they could find, and apples were important and available enough to be cultivated very early in our history.

But look deeper than the basic nutritional values it becomes clearer how this proverb can to exist in the first place.

Apples are rich in anti-oxidants, and the skin contains quercetin, which helps to boost the immune system and reduce inflammation. The fibre they contain is the soluble sort, called pectin, which aids a healthy digestive system, and also helps with cholesterol.

These benefits were enough to prompt a study in 2015, in which a group compiled the data of some 12000+ participants, from 2007 to 2010, assessing individual’s diets and the relationship the addition of a single apple a day had on their health and need to visit a doctor. The results of the study confirmed what we’d all long been saying:

“In unadjusted analyses, apple eaters were more likely to keep the doctor away (39.0% vs 33.9%)… Daily apple eaters were also more likely to successfully avoid prescription medication use.”

There is far more to it than that, of course (the benefits, statistically, are extremely minor), but in the simplest of terms, it appears that this is one of those rare instances where an English language proverb isn’t complete and utter nonsense.

An apple a day does, indeed, help keep the doctor away, but only in addition to an already healthy diet and lifestyle.

So that doesn’t mean you can eat pizza three meals a day, scoff an apple in between and live to 100.

Sorry folks.

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Sources

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4420713/
• https://writingexplained.org/idiom-dictionary/an-apple-a-day
• https://www.healthyperformance.co.uk/an-apple-a-day-keeps-the-doctor-away-but-what-does-it-really-mean/
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/history-behind-an-apple-a-day/2013/09/24/aac3e79c-1f0e-11e3-94a2-6c66b668ea55_story.html
• https://newint.org/features/1990/10/05/simply