Need another excuse to eat your vegetables? New studies say that a diet full of lettuce, spinach, beets, and other nitrate-rich veggies may lower your risk for stroke or heart attack. According to Harvard Health:

During digestion, your body converts nitrates into nitric oxide. This compound relaxes and widens blood vessels, which helps lower blood pressure. But does that translate to a longer life? To find out, researchers studied the diets of 1,226 older women who had no signs of fatty plaque in their arteries (atherosclerosis) and tracked them for 15 years.

They discovered that the more nitrate from vegetables the women consumed, the lower their risk of dying of cardiovascular disease.

The researchers can’t prove cause and effect, but the correlation certainly appears to be genuine. And “[j]ust one daily serving of a green leafy vegetable may be enough to lower stroke risk,” according to their study, so eat up!