Just like the old children's ditty, eating beans is in fact good for the heart -- and they help prevent strokes, too, according to scientists.

There is a catch, though. While the effects of eating soybeans regularly appear to drastically reduce women's chances of having a fatal heart attack or stroke, there were no indications that regular consumption had the same effect for men.

Based on the study by a Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare team, it appears a substance called isoflavone and found in soybeans makes it 70 percent less likely for women who consume soybeans five days a week to contract a heart attack or stroke compared to those who only imbibe two days or less a week.

"It seems there is a possibility that regularly eating soybeans containing isoflavone prevents heart attacks and strokes," Yoshihiro Kokubo of the National Cardiovascular Center said. "Soybeans also contain plenty of compounds other than isoflavone, though, so we don't know for sure yet whether isoflavone alone is what's preventing these things from happening."

Shoichiro Tsugane's research team studied about 40,000 men and women aged 40 to 59 from Iwate, Akita, Nagano and Okinawa prefectures from 1990 to 2002. When the study started, the subjects were not eligible if they had ever had a heart attack or cancer.

What the scientists learned was that women who ate soybeans at least five days a week had a rate of death from either heart attack or stroke only 0.31 times that of women who ate soybeans on two days or fewer each week. Compared by rate of isoflavone intake, the women with greater intake had a death rate just 0.39 times that of those who consumed the least. Among post-menopausal women, women with the greatest intake of isoflavone were only 0.25 times as likely as the lowest intake group to succumb to a heart attack or stroke.

Women in the greatest isoflavone intake group would eat one-third of a packet of tofu or a small pack of natto fermented beans (about 50 grams) daily.

Scientists said that similar trends were not evident among male subjects of the study.

The medical research team that carried out the study reported on their findings in the Nov. 27 edition of the U.S. magazine "Circulation."

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