Vegetarians 'cut heart risk by 32%'

[Northerner]

Ditching meat and fish in favour of a vegetarian diet can have a dramatic effect on the health of your heart, research suggests.

A study of 44,500 people in England and Scotland showed vegetarians were 32% less likely to die or need hospital treatment as a result of heart disease.

Differences in cholesterol levels, blood pressure and body weight are thought to be behind the health boost.

The findings were published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition

Heart disease is a major blight in Western countries. It kills 94,000 people in the UK each year - more than any other disease, and 2.6 million people live with the condition.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-21258509

 

[Northerner]

Does a veggie diet lead to a healthier heart?

A ?vegetarian diet reduces heart disease risk by up to a third?, Channel 4 News reports. The news, which has been reliably covered by much of the media, is based on an impressive and wide-ranging UK study on nutrition.
Researchers recruited nearly 45,000 people in England and Scotland. They followed up with them for an average of 11 years, using hospital records and death certificates to determine how many of them developed coronary heart disease during that time (e.g. suffering angina, coronary heart disease or having a heart attack).

Compared to people who ate meat and fish at the start of the study, the vegetarians were less likely to be diagnosed with, or die from, coronary heart disease over the following years.

This association held even when the researchers adjusted for factors that are known to be linked to heart disease, including weight, sex, age and smoking status.

This study suggests that there are significant heart benefits to a vegetarian diet, which, the researchers argue, are probably due to the fact that eating a vegetarian diet involves eating less cholesterol than a typical meat eater. Also a vegetarian diet may lead to healthier blood pressure.

Although there may be other health and lifestyle factors not studied that could also be associated with both being vegetarian and having a lower risk of heart disease, overall this was a large, long-term study that suggests there are heart health benefits to a vegetarian diet.

But it is uncertain whether everyone would enjoy the same reduction in risk in the unlikely event that everyone in the UK turned ?veggie? overnight.

http://www.nhs.uk/news/2013/01January/Pages/Does-a-veggie-diet-lead-to-a-healthier-heart.aspx