But if you do not have diabetes the risk from eggs only shows up if you eat 7+ eggs per week.
Middle-aged men who ate seven or more eggs a week had a higher risk of earlier death, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.
Men with diabetes who ate any eggs at all raised their risk of death during a 20-year period studied, according to the study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
People with diabetes are already under greater oxidative stress. A diabetic is already in a metabolic danger zone. I expect that some other subsets of populations who have less healthy metabolisms for other reasons (e.g. smokers) are also at greater risk from eating eggs.
My advice: The calorie budget you consume when eating eggs would be better spent by eating nuts (e.g. pistachios for heart health) and beans. Also, some montmorency tart cherries might lower cholesterol, triglycerides, and inflammation markers.
Looking death in the face is not a big enough motivator to get people to adopt good diets.
WORCESTER, Mass.—More than 13 million Americans have survived a heart attack or have been diagnosed with coronary heart disease (CHD), the number one cause of death in the United States. In addition to medications, lifestyle changes, such as a healthy diet and exercise, are known to reduce the risk for subsequent cardiac events. Despite this evidence, a high proportion of heart attack survivors do not follow their doctor’s advice to adhere to a healthy diet, according to researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS).
Humanity evolved in calorie-limited conditions and hence we crave sugar and fat. The threat of death is not strong enough to overcome deeply wired instincts.
Not enough fruits, vegetables, fiber. Not as good as several prominent weight loss diets.
Of a maximum 80 points—which indicates the healthiest diet—the average AHEI score was 30.8, with individual scores ranging between 5.1 and 69.8. The mean AHEI score was poorer than scores reported for samples of healthy individuals from the Health Professional’s Follow-up Study and the Nurses’ Health Study. In a previous study by Ma and colleagues, the AHEI of several popular weight loss plans was calculated; the highest scoring diet was the Ornish Diet (AHEI = 64.6) and lowest scoring diet was the Atkins diet (AHEI= 42.3). The fact that one year after a coronary event patients with known CHD still have lower AHEI scores than these popular diets may be indicative of the complex issues of effecting and sustaining behavioral change and the confusion patients may face in navigating through dietary recommendations. When examining AHEI components, only 12.4 percent of the participants met the optimal daily consumption of vegetables and 7.8 percent for fruit. Only 8 percent of the patients met the cereal fiber recommendation, and 5.2 percent of the participants limited their trans-fat intake to 0.5 percent of total calories or less. In addition, nearly 11 percent of calories were from saturated fat (less than 7 percent is recommended), while total fiber was only 16.8 grams per day (25 grams or more per day is recommended).
Well, diet research is all very interesting and I like to read and write about it. But we really need either gene therapy that will fix our damaged hearts or gene therapy that will reprogram our taste buds.
Using data from 38,615 men in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study and 67,271 women in the Nurses' Health Study, Willett; Marjorie McCullough of the American Cancer Society; and HSPH and HMS colleagues tested whether two alternative measures of diet quality worked better to predict disease risk. The Alternative Healthy Eating Index (AHEI) weighs quality of food choices (for example, ratio of white to red meat), while the Recommended Food Score (RFS) tallies healthy foods eaten. They examined the relationship between these measures and the incidence of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and non-traumatic death over 12 years in women and eight years in men.
The researchers found that men in the highest, healthiest quintile of AHEI scores had a 20 percent lower risk for these events compared with men in the lowest quintile. For women, risk was reduced 11 percent. The RFS was associated with a small reduction of risk in men but not in women. These risk reductions primarily reflected the association of dietary scores with cardiovascular disease; neither score predicted cancer risk.
You can read more about AHEI. It has nothing surprising. Eat less refined foods, more vegetables, white meat over red meat, and other advice that is already fairly widely disseminated.
Jan. 10, 2008 -- Overweight people who lose a moderate amount of weight get an immediate benefit in the form of better heart health, according to a study conducted at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. And the heart improvements happen whether that weight is shed by eating less or exercising more.
"If individuals want to do something that's good for their heart, then my message to them is lose weight by the method they find most tolerable," says the study's senior author Sándor J. Kovács, Ph.D, M.D., director of the Cardiovascular Biophysics Laboratory and professor of medicine. "They're virtually guaranteed that it will have a salutary effect on their cardiovascular system."
Studying a group of healthy, overweight but not obese, middle-aged men and women, the researchers found that a yearlong regimen of either calorie restriction or exercise increase had positive effects on heart function. Their analysis revealed that heart function was restored to a more youthful state so that during the heart's filling phase (called diastole) it took less time for participants' hearts to relax and fill with blood. The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of the American Journal of Physiology and are now available online.
Your tissues are accumulating collagen fibers that are making your tissues more fibrotic and stiff. Do you react like I do when reading descriptions of aging and think "what a waste" and "how disgusting" and "we need to find out how to fix that" and the like?
"As we get older, our tissues become more fibrotic as collagen fibers accumulate," says study co-author John O. Holloszy, M.D., professor of medicine in the Division of Geriatrics and Nutritional Science. "So the arteries and heart muscle stiffen, and the heart doesn't relax as well after contracting. Similar studies that we've conducted with members of the Caloric Restriction with Optimal Nutrition Society (CRONies) show they have heart function resembling much younger people." CRONies voluntarily consume about 25 percent fewer calories than the average American while still maintaining good nutrition.
We shouldn't have stiff heart muscles. I realize that there is an election campaign going on in America about all sorts of issues. But isn't the fact that our heart muscles are getting stiffer more important than all those issues? You are falling apart. We don't have the technology to reverse it. Development of such technology is possible. Shouldn't we think that is more important than personality politics?
Gaining the ability to relax a heart more quickly is a good thing.
By the end of the yearlong study, both the calorie restriction and exercise groups of volunteers lost 12 percent of their weight and 12 percent of their body mass index (BMI), a measurement considered to be a fairly reliable indicator of the amount of body fat. In both groups, participants' hearts responded to this weight loss by gaining the ability to relax more quickly, recovering some of the elasticity characteristic of younger heart tissue. Those in the calorie restriction group achieved slightly more reduction of heart stiffness.
Sounds like the calorie restriction group got the bigger benefit.
The detailed analysis showed that in both groups, the left ventricle gained an increased capacity to expand to accommodate blood entering during diastole. In the calorie restriction group, the global stiffness of the left ventricle decreased, suggesting that the muscle and connective tissue of the heart more readily sprang back after the contraction phase. This group also experienced a decrease in the internal pressure gradient, indicating that their left ventricles had better suction ability.
So eat less. Eat better too.