Recent research indicates that increased consumption of fruits and vegetables by middle-aged people reduces their susceptibility to stroke in later years.
Statements
Since we're primarily reading for Causal, Conditional, Comparative, or Pivot wording, we would want the causal verb in each sentence to stick out to us.
Eating more fruits susceptibility to and veggies during reduces stroke in later middle-aged years years
This might be because fruits and veggies have folic acid.
Low folic acid is associated with high homocysteine (correlation), and homocysteine contributes to blocked arteries.
If we were trying to assemble a causal chain, it might look like this:
eat lots of → high folic acid → fruit/vegetables low homocysteine
less blocked → less likely to arteries have a stroke
The one thing that might make us nervous about this is that the middle sentence says "researchers speculate that this may be because", so we don't want to sound overconfident.
Goal
Look for a safely worded answer that reinforces one (or more) of the causal connections we were told about.