London - If you’ve carefully been avoiding fatty foods to take care of your heart, here’s a word of warning.
A low fat diet may not protect against heart disease unless you eat “good fats” too, a study has found.
In one of the largest studies of heart disease ever, scientists at the University of Cambridge examined the diets of 25,000 Britons aged between 40 and 79.
They found those who ate foods rich in omega 6 – a fatty acid present in vegetable oils, nuts and seeds – significantly reduced their risk of heart problems.
But those who had simply cut their intake of unhealthy saturated fat – found in foods such as cheese, cakes and biscuits – did not reduce their risk to the same extent.
The researchers suggest the “balance of fats” in our diets could be the key to preventing coronary heart disease, which is the UK’s biggest killer. They say the current advice to reduce saturated fat in our diets is right, but ‘inconsistent’ because it does not tell people what to replace it with.
In the study, those at the highest risk of heart disease – who ate a lot of saturated fat and little omega 6 – were around 50 percent more likely to suffer from it than those at lowest risk. This was regardless of other major risk factors such as obesity and smoking.
The researchers took blood samples from the volunteers in the mid-1990s, then followed them up over an average of 13 years, looking at the fats in their bloodstream compared with heart disease sufferers.
Professor Kay-Tee Khaw, who led the study, said: “It is not as simple as fat is bad for heart disease. We found you have to replace saturated fat with polyunsaturated fatty acids to reduce the risk.” - Daily Mail