Monday, March 1, 2010 (Health.com) — Eating the wrong food and gaining too much weight can clog arteries with fatty deposits, potentially leading to life-threatening heart attacks and strokes. A new study suggests this process works both ways: Eating healthy and losing weight may actually reverse—rather than simply slow down—the accumulation of these fatty deposits, a condition known as atherosclerosis.
In the study, middle-aged people with heart disease or diabetes who lost more than 12 pounds over a two-year period successfully reduced the size of the deposits (or plaques) clogging their arteries, rather than merely halting their growth.
What’s more, the type of diet the study participants followed didn’t seem to make a difference, as long as they lost weight. A low-carb, low-fat, or Mediterranean-style diet all had positive effects on artery health, according to the study, which was published in the journal Circulation.
Most studies that have examined the effect of weight loss on atherosclerosis have also involved putting people on powerful drugs like cholesterol-lowering statins, says James O’Keefe, MD, the director of preventive cardiology at the Mid-America Heart Institute, in Kansas City, Mo.
“This [study] is just relying on diet alone and got very impressive results, as good as you see with drugs,” says Dr. O’Keefe, who was not involved in the current research.
The study looked at 140 people in Israel between the ages of 40 and 65 who were at least moderately overweight and had heart disease or type 2 diabetes. In addition to following one of the three diets, 20% of the participants took a statin, and roughly 30% took blood-pressure medication.
After two years on a diet, roughly two-thirds of the study participants had less clogging in their neck arteries than when the study began. (Although the carotid artery in the neck is not responsible for heart attacks, its condition would likely be similar to that of the coronary arteries, which are more difficult to image, the researchers say.) The volume of the plaques in their neck arteries declined by about 5%, on average, or slightly more than the average annual increase in people with atherosclerosis, as other studies have shown.
People who had greater weight loss and reduction in blood pressure tended to have healthier arteries, the researchers found. The people whose arteries became less clogged lost about 12 pounds, on average, while their systolic blood pressure (the top number) fell by around 7 points. By contrast, the people whose atherosclerosis worsened lost just 7 pounds, on average, and reduced their systolic blood pressure by just 1 point. (The use of statins did not seem to be a significant factor, the researchers reported.)
Next page: Diets can be difficult to stick to
