How Could ‘Going Veggie’ Improve Your Heart Health?

Researchers from the University of Oxford have discovered that a vegetarian diet is not only better for animal wellbeing, but also your own. According to their study, which was published in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, vegetarians are less likely to be diagnosed with, or die from, coronary heart disease than people who eat meat and fish.

Funded by Cancer Research UK and the UK Medical Research Council, the prospective cohort study examined the association of a vegetarian diet with the risk of developing ischaemic heart disease (IHD), which is a general term to describe a number of conditions where the supply of blood the muscles of your heart becomes restricted. It usually occurs because a build-up of fatty products, such as cholesterol, thickens your artery walls, restricting the blood flow through your coronary arteries that supply your heart.

Between 1993 and 1997, individuals over the age of 20 years were recruited, including vegetarians and vegans specifically, as well as the UK general population. The participants reported what they ate over the previous year via a food-frequency questionnaire, and this information was collected again five years into the study’s follow-up period. The investigators made no distinction between vegetarians and vegans, only those who ate meat and fish and those who did not.

The results showed that over an average of 11.6 years follow-up, there were 1,235 cases of IHD (1,066 of these were hospital admissions, and 169 were deaths). Vegetarians, who tended to be younger than non-vegetarians, were less likely to report receiving long-term medical treatment, and 85% of this group reported that they were still vegetarians five years into the follow-up period. Compared to the meat-lovers, the researchers found that vegetarians had a 32% lower risk of developing IHD during the follow-up period.

In specific terms, between the ages of 50 and 70, the probability of being hospitalised for, or dying of, IHD was 4.6% among vegetarians and 6.8% among non-vegetarians, and the reduced risk was the same for both continuous vegetarians and among those who were no longer vegetarians at five years’ follow-up. Though the effect on IHD was lessened slightly to a 28% reduction among vegetarians when the researchers adjusted for BMI, relationship remained significant even after adjusting for other risk factors associated with IHD such as smoking, alcohol, physical activity (or lack of it) and markers of socioeconomic status.