"DASH" to Help Your Heart

DASH stands for "Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension."

By eating a lot of fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy products, and whole grains, you could actively keep your own blood pressure under control. The goal of the diet is to lower saturated fats and increase levels of fiber, calcium, potassium and magnesium.

Over the past decade or so, the DASH diet has been proven nearly beyond a doubt to help lower blood pressure. Other than that, it is simply a very healthful way to eat. But could it do more than stop hypertension? Could it delay or even prevent heart failure? That is a question posed by researchers in a new study published in the "Annals of Internal Medicine."

The Swedish study did indeed find that the DASH diet can reduce the risk of heart failure in women (who were the study group). Researchers discovered that women who kept diets the most similar to a DASH diet had a 51% lower rate of heart failure than those whose diets were furthest from DASH. Even after they took into account other possible factors for heart disease, this link remained true.

It is another way that the DASH diet can help your heart and cardiovascular system. The study included 36,000 women between 48 and 83 years of age, all of whom filled out a food questionnaire. None had heart failure at the beginning of the study. Over the next seven years, 443 women developed heart failure and 28 died. The good news is that heart failure is not common, as the 443 represents just 1.2% of the total number.

The study found the link between the DASH diet and heart failure even after adjusting for age, physical activity, energy intake, education status, family history of heart attacks, smoking, postmenopausal hormone use, living alone, high blood pressure, high cholesterol concentration, and body weight and mass.

So, how you do most closely align with the DASH diet? In the study, every day, women closest to following the diet ate three servings of fruit, 3.5 servings of vegetables, five servings of whole grains and 1.6 servings of low-fat dairy products each day. They also drank only 0.1 servings of sweetened beverages and ate 0.8 servings of red or processed meat (high in saturated fat).

In the past, researchers have found that, by lowering blood pressure to a certain extent, the DASH diet could lower heart failure risk by 12%. Other possible ways it protects is by lowering cholesterol, reducing oxidative stress on the body's cells, and limiting the amount of fat and sugar in the bloodstream.

Source:
"DASH" to Help Your Heart Levitan, E., et al., "Consistency with the DASH diet and incidence of heart failure," Arch. Intern. Med. 2009; 169: 851-57.

Your Health and Mine