Eating fruits, veggies when young keeps cardiologist away

Reporting in the journal Circulation, scientists studied how differences in the amount of fruits and vegetables that people ate as children affected their hearts 20 years later. Higher coronary calcium scores are associated with a higher risk for heart attacks and other coronary heart disease events.

“I think one of the take-home points is that it’s very clear that dietary patterns are established pretty early in life and it gets harder and harder to change your diet the further on down the road you get”, Dr. Michael Miedema, with the Minneapolis Heart Institute, said.

The team enrolled 2,506 participants who were a part of the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study.

The subjects were allocated to one of three groups based on their daily intake of fruits and vegetables. In the group with the highest intake of fruits and vegetables, women consumed an average of nine portions a day, while men ate an average of seven portions daily.

The study noted that people who ate the most fruits and vegetables at the start of their examination had 26 percent lower odds of developing calcified plaque, a disease that hardens arteries and underlies many types of heart disease, 20 years later, compared to those who ate the least amount of fruits and vegetables.

Twenty years later the volunteers were given computerised tomography (CT) scans to check for the build-up of calcium on the walls of heart arteries.

Among those in the bottom third, women averaged about three servings a day and men averaged about 2 1/2 servings.

Fruit and vegetable intake is likely a marker for a life-long healthy diet and lifestyle, said Alice H. Lichtenstein of Tufts University in Boston, who wrote an editorial accompanying the new results. At the start, in 1985, researchers collected diet history and other health-related data from blacks and whites ages 18 to 30.

In the past, there have been studies that show the link between eating fruits and veggies and a reduced risk of heart disease in middle-aged adults, but this is the first time a study looked at how fruits and veggies can improve heart health and blood vessels later in life.

Those who ate more fruits and vegetables, not surprisingly, also tended to eat healthier diets overall, including consuming more fish and healthier oils from nuts.

“We know there are multiple things about fruits and vegetables that are healthy”, he said. Now there’s good scientific evidence that your mother was right-eat your vegetables (and your fruit).