An egg a day may keep the doctor away, study claims

For decades, experts warned that eating eggs raises levels of unhealthy cholesterol. But a study claimed on Tuesday that an egg a day may actually reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke.

While outside experts cautioned against reading too much into the study, its authors claimed that Chinese adults who ate an egg every day had a lower risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD).

After studying half-a-million healthy adults aged 30-79 over almost nine years, researchers concluded that “compared with non-consumers, daily egg consumption was associated with lower risk of CVD.”

Risk of hemorrhagic stroke was 26 percent lower among egg-eaters, the Chinese-British research team also reported in the journal Heart.

And daily egg consumption was associated with an 18-percent lower risk of death from CVD, and a 28-percent lower risk for death from hemorrhagic stroke, it added.

CVD, a group of disorders of the heart and blood vessels, is the leading cause of death and disability worldwide, including in China.

According to the World Health Organization, about 17.7 million people die of CVDs each year, almost a third of all deaths worldwide.

Eighty percent of CVD deaths are caused by heart attacks and strokes.

Smoking, not exercising enough, and eating an unhealthy diet high in salt and low in fresh fruit and vegetables, increase the risk.

Chicken and egg

Eggs are rich in dietary cholesterol, long linked to a higher CVD risk, but also contain crucial protein and vitamins.

In the study group, 13 percent reported daily egg consumption while nine percent said they never or hardly ever ate them.

By the end of the study period, almost 84,000 cases of CVD and 10,000 CVD deaths were recorded and compared among the different egg-intake groups.

“The present study finds that there is an association between moderate level of egg consumption (up to 1 egg per day) and a lower cardiac event rate,” the authors concluded.

But experts not involved in the study, said the results fail to prove that eating eggs actively lowers CVD risk.

“An important limitation of this present study is that the people who consumed eggs regularly were much more affluent than those who avoided them,” University College of London nutrition specialist Tom Sanders said.

“Indeed, rates of stroke have been falling in Japan, Australia, North America, and Europe for several decades for reasons that remain uncertain but may be related to increasing affluence,” he also said via the Science Media Centre in London.

According to cardiology expert Gavin Sandercock, of the University of Essex, “to say that eating eggs is good (or bad) for you based on a study like this would be foolish as diet is much more complicated than picking on one foodstuff like eggs.”

A second paper published in Heart found that people who commute to work by walking or cycling had a risk of heart disease and stroke 11 percent lower than those who take the car.

Their risk of dying from CVD diseases was almost a third lower, found the seven-year study of more than 350,000 people in Britain.  /kga

source: technology.inquirer.net

A little chocolate each week may help prevent a heart flutter, study says

Indulging in a little chocolate each week maybe be linked with a lower risk of developing the heart rhythm irregularity atrial fibrillation, according to new Danish research.

Also known as a heart flutter, atrial fibrillation affects more than 33 million people worldwide, and one in four adults are likely to develop the condition at some point in their life. However, it’s not clear what causes it or how to prevent it, and there is no known cure.

As regular chocolate consumption, especially of dark chocolate, has been shown to be beneficial for other heart conditions, the team behind the new research wanted to see if chocolate could also help reduce the risk of atrial fibrillation.

The researchers looked at data from 55,502 (26,400 male and 29,100 female) participants, aged between 50 and 64, who were taking part in the Danish Diet, Cancer and Health Study.

Participants reported on their usual weekly chocolate consumption, with one serving classified as 1 ounce (30 g).

Although they were not asked to specify what type of chocolate they consumed, most chocolate eaten in Denmark is milk chocolate, which has a minimum 30 percent cocoa solids.

The team also gathered information on participants’ diet and lifestyle at the beginning of the study, including information on heart disease risk factors such as smoking. Participants were then monitored for an average of 13.5 years.

The results showed that the diagnosis rate of atrial fibrillation rate was 10 percent lower for those who are 1-3 servings of chocolate a month than it was for those who ate less than 1 serving a month.

Those who ate one serving of chocolate a week benefited from a 17 percent lower risk of atrial fibrillation, and those who increased this to 2-6 weekly servings benefited from a 20 percent lower risk.

Those who ate one or more servings daily showed a 14 percent lower risk.

When they looked at any sex differences between the results, the findings showed that the association seemed to be strongest for women when they ate 1 weekly serving of chocolate (21 percent lower risk), and strongest for men when they consumed between 2 and 6 weekly servings (23 percent lower risk).

As an observational study, no firm conclusions can be made, and certain factors could affect the health benefits of the chocolate, for example adding milk.

However the team still concluded, “Regardless of the limitations of the Danish chocolate study, the findings are interesting and warrant further consideration, especially given the importance of identifying effective prevention strategies for [atrial fibrillation],” which have so far proved elusive.

The findings can be found published online in the journal Heart. KI

source: lifestyle.inquirer.net

New US diet rule gets mixed response on social media

NEW YORK  - A new health guideline suggesting people should cut consumption of sugar while increasing intake of meat, coffee and cholesterol-heavy foods drew heated response on social media on Friday.

Hashtag #DietaryGuidelines was among the top trending topics on Twitter after US government released a report late on Thursday suggesting people should keep their sugar and corn syrup intake to less than 10 percent of daily calorie consumption.

Currently the average American consumes about 270 calories a day in sweeteners, or 13 percent, the guidelines said.

The new rules allow up to five cups of coffee a day, drop a previous limit on the consumption of cholesterol-laden food (while still curbing saturated fats to less than 10 percent of calories per day) and allow a variety of meats.

Twitter user @NVGhost005 wrote cynically: "With all these new dietary guidelines coming out, EVERYTHING one eats/drinks puts one at risk. Might as well not care."

"After reading the full report, these guidelines are quite disappointing, IMHO #DietaryGuidelines", tweeted health coach Pam McGovern (@weavegirl40) on Friday.

Comedian Brian Parise (@bpcomedy) also tweeted an image sarcastically poking fun at the report: "People are being critical of the new dietary guidelines the government put out today, but I think they nailed it.”


  People are being critical of the new dietary guidelines the government put out today, but I think they nailed it. pic.twitter.com/pea8yHsyoe

 — Brian Parise (@bpcomedy) January 7, 2016

— Reuters

Mediterranean diet plus olive oil may reduce breast cancer risk

Over time, eating a Mediterranean-style diet that emphasizes fish, vegetables and particularly olive oil, may lower women’s risk of breast cancer compared to following a low-fat diet, suggests a new study from Spain.

In the five-year trial that randomly assigned women to different kinds of diets, those instructed to eat a Mediterranean-style diet with four tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil per day had about half as many breast cancer diagnoses as those on a low-fat diet.

“With an overall healthy diet plus extra virgin olive oil there is a reduction in the hard endpoint of breast cancer,” said senior author Dr. Miguel A. Martinez-Gonzalez of the University of Navarra in Pamplona and CIBEROBN in Madrid.

“We have now evidence to support that olive oil is causally related to reduction in risk of breast cancer,” he said.

The fact that the findings are based on a randomized trial, the gold-standard of research, “immediately impressed” the journal editors, writes Dr. Mitchell H. Katz, deputy editor of JAMA Internal Medicine, in an editor’s note accompanying the study.

Still, the authors caution in their report, the data come from a larger long-term trial whose primary focus is heart disease. And out of more than 4,000 women included in the breast cancer study, there were only 35 cases of breast cancer, a low number of total cases for statistical analysis. This and a lack of data about cancer-screening mammograms among the women limit the results, they write.

Martinez-Gonzalez and colleagues studied breast cancer outcomes in women participating in PREDIMED, a study of the Mediterranean diet’s protective effects against cardiovascular disease and a variety of other illnesses (see Reuters Health story of May 11, 2015 here: reut.rs/1RyZALT).

Between 2003 and 2009, a total of 4,282 women ages 60 to 80 years old with a high risk of cardiovascular disease were randomly assigned to a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra virgin olive oil, the same diet supplemented with nuts or to a comparison group that was told to reduce their overall dietary fat intake.

Those in the two Mediterranean diet groups were given either one liter (34 ounces) of olive oil per week or 30 grams (1 ounce) of nuts per day for free. The olive oil group was instructed to consume about 50 grams (4.2 tablespoons) per day, including in cooked foods and on salads or bread.

The women had quarterly sessions with dieticians, completing questionnaires that gauged how well they were following their assigned diet. There was no specific advice to reduce overall calorie intake or to increase physical activity.

A Mediterranean diet is a plant-based diet that replaces most desserts with fruit, limits beverage intake to mostly water or red wine, reduces dairy intake and keeps red meat consumption to once a week or less, Martinez-Gonzalez said.

Over the course of the study, there were 17 confirmed diagnoses of breast cancer in the low-fat comparison group, 10 in the Mediterranean diet with nuts group and eight in the Mediterranean diet with olive oil group, the researchers found.

There is some evidence with animal studies that extra virgin olive oil, which is rich in polyphenols, may induce programmed cell death or early cancer cells in the breast, Martinez-Gonzalez told Reuters Health.

“It is definitively important to assess with new trials the transferability of a Mediterranean diet to other countries,” he said. “Here our participants were very happy, we provided olive oil for free and gave shopping lists and written materials.”

Done correctly, the Mediterranean diet is delicious and much more enjoyable than a low-fat diet, he said.

There were no apparent negative side effects of the dietary change, he said.

“At the beginning it is tough, but little by little participants change in the right direction and they enjoy the cooking procedure,” he said.

The study had many limitations, but a Mediterranean diet is safe and does reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, Katz writes. “It may also prevent breast cancer. We hope to see more emphasis on Mediterranean diet to reduce cancer and cardiovascular disease and improve health and well-being.” — Reuters

Carbs more harmful than saturated fats – study

WASHINGTON - Long-derided saturated fats—associated with an array of health problems such as heart disease—caught a break Friday when research revealed their intake could be doubled or even nearly tripled without driving up their level in a person's blood.

Carbohydrates, meanwhile, are associated with heightened levels of a fatty acid linked to increased risk for diabetes and heart disease, the same study showed.

"The point is you don't necessarily save the saturated fat that you eat, and the primary regulator of what you save in terms of fat is the carbohydrate in your diet," senior author Jeff Volek of Ohio State University, said in the report.

To conduct the study, which appeared in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists put 16 participants on a strict dietary regime that lasted four and a half months.


Every three weeks their diets were changed to adjust carbohydrate and total fat and saturated fat levels.

The scientists found that when carbs were reduced and saturated fat was increased, total saturated fat in the blood did not increase, and even went down in most people.

The fatty acid called palmitoleic acid, which is associated with "unhealthy metabolism of carbohydrates that can promote disease," went down with low-carb diets and gradually increased as carbs were re-introduced, the study said.

An increase in this fatty acid indicates that a growing proportion of carbohydrates is being converted into fat instead of being burned by the body, the researchers said.

"When you consume a very low-carb diet your body preferentially burns saturated fat," Volek said.

"We had people eat two times more saturated fat than they had been eating before entering the study, yet when we measured saturated fat in their blood, it went down in the majority of people," he said.

The finding "challenges the conventional wisdom that has demonized saturated fat and extends our knowledge of why dietary saturated fat doesn't correlate with disease," Volek added.

By the end of the trial, participants saw "significant improvements" in blood glucose, insulin and blood pressure and lost an average of 22 pounds (10 kilograms).

"There is widespread misunderstanding about saturated fat. In population studies, there's clearly no association of dietary saturated fat and heart disease, yet dietary guidelines continue to advocate restriction of saturated fat. That's not scientific and not smart," Volek said. — Agence France-Presse

source: gmanetwork.com

High-fat diets linked to some types of breast cancer

NEW YORK - Women who eat a lot of fat, particularly saturated fat, may be at higher risk of certain types of breast cancer, new research suggests.

Past studies have come to differing conclusions on a possible association between dietary fat and breast cancer. Whether the two are even linked at all remains controversial.

The new report, a second analysis of a large, long-term study, suggests that fat may play a role in the development of certain forms of the disease but not others, the authors said.

Still, it cannot prove that a high-fat diet is the reason any of the women got cancer.

"In our study we confirm that saturated fat intake was positively associated with breast cancer risk," lead author Sabina Sieri, from the Fondazione IRCCS National Cancer Institute in Milan, Italy, told Reuters Health in an email.

"Saturated fatty acids intake should be as low as possible within the context of a nutritionally adequate diet."

Saturated fat in the diet most often comes from meat and other animal products like butter and cheese.

The research team's findings are based on a study of about 337,000 women from 10 European countries. They filled out questionnaires about their diet and lifestyle and were followed for an average of 11 to 12 years.

During that time, about 10,000 of the women were diagnosed with breast cancer.

The original study found that women who ate the most saturated fat were more likely to develop breast cancer than those who ate the least.

For the new analysis, the researchers used patient medical records to classify breast cancers into specific subtypes, for instance based on whether the tumor may respond to the hormones estrogen and progesterone.

They found that women with diets high in saturated fat were 28 percent more likely to develop tumors that had receptors for estrogen and progesterone than women with the lowest saturated fat in their diets. The pattern was similar for total fat intake.

However, the chance of developing breast tumors without receptors for those hormones was not linked to dietary fat, according to the findings published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

The researchers said it's possible dietary fat increases the level of sex hormones in the body. That could explain why high-fat diets are tied to a greater risk of tumors whose growth is related to estrogen and progesterone, known as hormone-receptor-positive cancers. Those cancers make up the majority of breast cancer diagnoses.

Sieri and colleagues found that high levels of saturated fat were also linked to a greater risk of HER2 negative breast cancer, but not HER2 positive disease. HER2 stands for human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 and is one factor used to determine how fast a cancer is growing.

Dr. Clifford A. Hudis, chief of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's Breast Cancer Medicine Service in New York, said the extra risk of hormone-receptor-positive cancer linked to saturated fat was "relatively modest."

What's more, he added, "These patients were not randomly assigned to follow one diet or another."

That means other differences between women who ate high- and low-fat diets may have factored into their cancer risk.

Still, Hudis said, the findings are consistent with recent research looking at specific types of breast cancer and make sense based on what is known about the biological effects of dietary fat.

Dr. Michelle Holmes, who has studied diet and breast cancer at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, said that in the grand scheme of things, any possible link between fat and breast cancer still seems to be small.

"In my opinion, the bottom line is that if the association with fat and breast cancer exists, it's fairly small (and) it's probably limited to certain subtypes," Holmes told Reuters Health.

Even though the new study included a "huge" number of women, she said, "the answer doesn't leap out at you."

Hudis and Holmes, who were not involved in the new research, agreed there's no reason women shouldn't still cut back on saturated fat.

"Saturated fat is bad for heart disease anyway," Holmes said.

"The associations with dietary fat are much stronger for heart disease, which still kills more women than breast cancer in the United States." —Reuters

source: gmanetwork.com

High-calorie diet may slow Lou Gehrig’s disease

PARIS - A diet rich in calories and carbohydrates may slow progression of the lethal, degenerative Lou Gehrig's disease, according to a small-scale study reported in The Lancet on Friday.

Formally called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or motor neuron disease, the disorder affects nerve cells that control muscle movement.

Patients become tired and weak and lose the power to move and eventually breathe; they die three years on average after being diagnosed.

The new study follows up on suspicions that ALS patients may be placed at even greater risk if they lose weight. They find it hard to eat and swallow, and eventually have to be fed with a tube directly into the stomach.

Experiments on mice genetically engineered to display ALS symptoms have found that those given a high-calorie diet rich in fat survived longer.

Building on this work, researchers in the United States tested 20 volunteers with advanced ALS who were at the stage of being tube-fed.

The patients were divided into three groups.

One was a "control" group which received a nutritional formula designed to keep their weight stable, while the other two received 125 percent of the calories they needed to maintain their weight.

Of these two groups, one received a high-calorie diet rich in carbohydrates, and the other a high-calorie diet rich in fats.

The diets lasted for four months, and patients were followed for a further five months afterwards.

Patients on the diet that was high in calories and carbs did far better than counterparts in the two other groups, the researchers found.

They experienced fewer "adverse events"—health problems ranging from pneumonia to muscular pains or rashes.

They also gained more weight, picking up 390 grams (0.8 pounds) per month on average, compared to a gain of 110g (0.24 pounds) in the control group and a loss of 460g (1.01 pounds) in the high-calorie high-fat diet group.

During the five-month followup, no deaths occurred among the high-calorie, high-carbohydrate group, compared with one in the high-fat group and three in the control group, said the study.

The experiment was only conducted on a small scale and its chief goal had been to see whether ALS patients could safely change diet, rather than testing how effective the switch might be.

"This pilot study demonstrates the safety of a novel, simple, low-cost treatment for a devastating disease where currently very few treatment options are available," said lead researcher Anne-Marie Wills at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

"The adverse outcomes that we feared might result from weight gain, such as diabetes or heart disease, were not observed in our study period."

The team called for larger trials among patients at an earlier stage of ALS, to see whether these optimistic but cautious findings hold true. —Agence France-Presse

source: gmanetwork.com

A low-sodium diet is still the best bet – study

NEW YORK - Eating less than one teaspoon of salt per day remains the ideal goal for Americans, according to a new study.

Most research has linked high sodium consumption with greater risks of stroke and cardiovascular disease. Evidence has shown that men and women age 51 or older, African Americans or those with hypertension, diabetes or chronic kidney disease face especially high risks.

But when several studies produced findings suggesting diets could be too low in sodium, the US Institute of Medicine (IOM) asked experts to review studies on the health effects of sodium.

The data "weren't entirely convincing," said Nancy Cook, lead author of the current study published in the journal Circulation, and a member of that expert panel.

Cook is a statistician at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

In an attempt to resolve the conflicting information, Cook and her team analyzed data from a previous large study called the Trials of Hypertension Prevention (TOHP) designed to look at high blood pressure. The TOHP followed the field's "gold-standard" technique of measuring salt consumption in 24-hour urine samples.

Other salt consumption studies have used single urine collections or overnight samples, neither of which provide as much consistency and accuracy as samples that participants collected throughout an entire day and night.

"The quality of the sodium measures (in TOHP) is probably better than any other study out there," Cook said.

"We found there were no adverse effects with lower amounts of sodium and benefits continued to be seen at the lowest sodium levels," she said. The findings match up with most evidence available.

"People should realize—and it may be difficult to do with all of the conflicting information in the press—that quality differs from study to study," Cook said. "When you get down to the details, some studies are more reliable than others."

Main food culprits containing high sodium include bread, cured meat, pizza, poultry, soup, cheese and snacks, wrote Lyn Steffen of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health in Minneapolis in an editorial that accompanied the new study.

On the nutritional facts panel on food packaging, if the sodium amount per serving is 5 percent daily value, then that is a low-sodium product, Steffen said. Products with 20 percent daily value are high-sodium.

Even though modern lifestyle is busy, Dr. Graham MacGregor of Queen Mary University and chairman of the World Action on Salt and Health lobby group, suggested a solution: "If you cook fresh vegetables, potatoes, pasta and rice with fresh meat or fish, make more than you can consume, you can then put portions in the freezer and use this on different occasions so that the food can be instantly ready."

In restaurants, the challenge to eat less salt can be greater. "You can request that no salt be added," Cook said.

"If you suddenly cut all sodium from your meals, then things will taste bland," Cook said. "So it's important to lower sodium gradually and get accustomed to lower amounts of salt."

As the body adjusts to lower sodium levels, then foods with high sodium may be less appealing, she said. — Reuters

source: gmanetwork.com