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Chicago—Eating a handful of nuts twice or more a week may cut one’s risk of deadly heart disease, based on a study of male doctors released yesterday.
Nuts and fish are plentiful in the Mediterranean diet, which is known to be heart-friendly, and many types of nuts are also a healthy source of unsaturated fats, magnesium and vitamin E, according to the report by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Dr. Christine Albert examined the nut consumption of more than 21,000 male doctors participating in the U.S. Physicians’ Health Study, which began in 1982, and found a 47 percent lower risk of sudden cardiac death among those who consumed an ounce of nuts at least twice a week compared to those who did not eat nuts at all. She also found a 30 percent lower risk of coronary heart disease death among the nut eaters. The correlation did not apply for non-fatal heart attacks.
“If the observed associations between dietary habits such as nut and fish consumption are casual, then these dietary interventions could be applied with little risk,” Albert wrote.
There were 201 sudden cardiac deaths and 566 heart disease deaths among the study subjects during the 17 years they were tracked.
Another study released yesterday showed that cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins help prevent heart attacks and stroke in older adults, researchers said.
“We observed a 56 percent lower risk of incident cardiovascular events and a 44 percent lower all cause mortality associated with the use of statin among people whose average age was 72 when the study began...” said the report appearing in the Archives of Internal Medicine, published by the American Medical Association.
The findings were based on an eight-year study of 5,888 men and women 65 years and older.
The study was funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and the National Institute on Aging.
-Reuters
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