Courtesy of MedHeadlines
Researchers who studied the dining habits of almost 89,000 women over a period of 24 years have concluded that those who routinely consumed a diet as close as possible to the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet were at significantly less risk for coronary heart disease and stroke than the women in the study who deviated the most from the DASH dietary guidelines.
The Nurses’ Health Study followed 88,517 female nurses, whose ages ranged from 34 to 59 at the beginning of the study in 1980. None of them had diabetes or cardiovascular disease at the inception of the study. They reported their typical dietary fare seven times over the course of the 24-year study, with each report reflecting their dietary habits from each previous year.
Researchers then analyzed their diets and assigned them a DASH score according to their intake of eight food and nutritional factors. The higher the DASH score, the better the diet. A high score meant a diet that included plenty of fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, and whole grains and consumption of low-fat dairy products in quantities close to the recommended dietary guidelines. Consumption of processed and red meats, sodium, and sweetened beverages led to lower scores.
In previous studies high DASH scores have been proven to lower both systolic and diastolic (top and bottom numbers, respectively) blood pressure readings, even in patients with high blood pressure. The DASH diet is also linked to a reduction in low-density lipoproteins (the bad LDL) cholesterol. Both these factors lead to a reduced risk of stroke and heart disease.
During the course of the study, 2,317 nurses had strokes, 2,129 suffered non-fatal heart attacks, and 976 succumbed to coronary heart disease. To isolate the influence of the DASH diets, study participants were placed in five groups according to DASH score. The one-fifth of nurses with the highest scores were 24% less likely to experience coronary heart disease and were 18% less prone to have strokes than the nurses who scored in the bottom one-fifth.
Blood samples revealed that the nurses in the higher DASH score groups had the lowest levels of interleukin 6 (IL-6) and C-reactive protein (CRP), two compounds that signal inflammation associated with heart disease.
Teresa T. Fung, ScD, Simmons College, Boston, and her research colleagues suggest further studies using different population demographics to determine the heart-healthy benefits of the DASH diet in other people and to compare the DASH diet to the healthful benefits of other diets considered healthy, such as the Mediterranean diet.
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