Should we be considering vegan diets? New research finds that consuming more plant foods could lower heart disease risk in young adults.
This is the outcome of longitudinal study which ran over the course of 30 years. This is supported by a short study, running across a 15-year period, which determined that eating more plant-based foods can lower cholesterol (a factor associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease in postmenopausal women).
Both studies were conducted at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health in Minneapolis, drawing upon published health informatics data.
A plant-based diet refers to food consumption based on foods derived from plant sources. This can include fruit, vegetables, grains, pulses, legumes, nuts and meat substitutes such as soy products.
The diet is not easy to define since people invariably different interpretations of what ‘plant-based’ eating looks like. A plant-based diet is not necessarily the same as veganism, since vegans forgo all animal products relating to clothes and other areas.
With the research, the diet considered optimal was the so-named “Portfolio Diet“, a food regime that includes nuts; plant protein from soy, beans or tofu; viscous soluble fiber from oats, barley, okra, eggplant, oranges, apples and berries; plant sterols from enriched foods and monounsaturated fats found in olive and canola oil and avocadoes; along with limited consumption of saturated fats and dietary cholesterol.
The research reached a number of conclusions. The first, was that subjects categorized in the top 20 percent on the long-term diet quality score (meaning they ate the most nutritionally rich plant foods and fewer adversely rated animal products) were 52 percent less likely to develop cardiovascular disease. This figure increase if people switched to a plant-based diet under the age of 25. Here, this group were 61 percent less likely to develop subsequent cardiovascular disease.
With older women, those with the closest alignment to a true plant-based diet were found to be 11 percent less likely to develop any type of cardiovascular disease. Moreover, this group were 14 percent less likely to develop coronary heart disease and 17 percent less likely to develop heart failure.
Both studies feature in the Journal of the American Heart Association. The first is titled “Relationship Between a Plant‐Based Dietary Portfolio and Risk of Cardiovascular Disease: Findings From the Women’s Health Initiative Prospective Cohort Study.” The second study is described: “Plant‐Centered Diet and Risk of Incident Cardiovascular Disease During Young to Middle Adulthood.”
