Swap your full fat dairy products with low fat ones to reduce your chances of stroke says a study published in the journal Stroke.

Almost 75,000 Swedish men and women participated in the study. All the subjects were healthy when the trial began in 1997.

The participants completed a 96-item food frequency questionnaire. During a follow-up of about 10 years, researchers found that there were about 4,000 cases of stroke.

The researchers found that those who ate low fat dairy products were 12 percent less likely to suffer from stroke than those who ate full fat products.

“This is the largest study to date to examine the association between total consumption of total, low-fat, full-fat and specific dairy foods and the risk of stroke in adult men and women,” said Dr. Susanna Larsson, associate professor of epidemiology in the Division of Nutritional Epidemiology, at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and lead author of the study.

“From a public health perspective, if people consume more low-fat dairy foods rather than high-fat dairy foods, they will benefit from a reduced risk of stroke and other positive health outcomes,” she added, according to The Telegraph.

According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, someone in the United States has a stroke every 40 seconds. Every four minutes someone dies of stroke.

Each year, about 795,000 people in the United States suffer a stroke. About 610,000 of these are first or new strokes.

In 2010, stroke cost United States an estimated $53.9 billion. This total includes the cost of health care services, medications, and missed days of work.

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