DASH diet leads to healthy heart

Wednesday May 27, 2009 (foodconsumer.org) -- Eating the right foods can lower risk of high blood pressure, cut bad cholesterol, and researchers now say can also prevent the risk of heart failure in women.

The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet was developed by the National Institutes of Health and was shown in earlier studies to reduce blood pressure. A new study shows that women who followed the diet’s recommendations reduced their risk of heart failure. The DASH diet plan favors fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy products and whole grains.

“Women whose diets were most like the DASH eating plan had the lowest rates of heart failure,” said Emily Levitan of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “Women in the top quarter had rates of heart failure 37 percent lower than women in the bottom quarter.” Women in the top ten percent of the diet scores had half the rate of heart failure that women with the lowest scores had.

Researchers analyzed data from more than 36,000 Swedish women aged 48 to 83 years, according to HealthDay News. When they completed a questionnaire about their eating habits from 1997 to 1998 they did not have heart failure. During seven years of follow-up, 443 women developed heart failure, according to the report.

“The (DASH) diet may contribute to prevention of heart failure in some cases because it effectively reduced blood pressure and low-density lipoprotein (bad) cholesterol levels in clinical trials,” wrote Levitan and colleagues in the study.

The DASH study was published in the May 11 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine and was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

(By Sheilah Downey, and edited by Heather Kelley)