New pyramid is built on disease prevention
The food guide pyramid needs to be rebuilt if Americans are to significantly cut their risk of chronic diseases, Harvard researchers say.
They designed and tested a new pyramid, one that emphasizes fiber from whole grains rather than refined ones, white meat (fish or chicken) over red and unsaturated fats over saturated ones. It also suggests alternate protein sources, such as nuts and soy, a multivitamin and moderate alcohol intake. The U.S. Department of Agriculture pyramid and the Harvard one emphasize fruits and vegetables.
The researchers analyzed responses of 100,000 men and women to food questionnaires completed periodically over 10 years. Because the volunteers were participating in long-term health studies, data about their illnesses were also available.
Using the Alternative Healthy Eating Index, a scoring system that measured how closely volunteers’ diets matched the new guidelines, the researchers found that men with the highest scores lowered their risk of chronic diseases by 20%, compared with participants with the lowest scores and that women cut their risk by 11%. Previously, the researchers had found that adhering to the USDA guidelines reduced the risk by 11% for men and 3% for women. The biggest effect of the new guidelines was on heart disease, the researchers said. “The reduction in risk was twice as strong as when we evaluated the USDA guidelines,” says coauthor Marji McCullough, a researcher at the American Cancer Society in Atlanta.
The study was published in the December issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
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Women’s risk of ‘sudden death’ from heart disease seems to be rising
More than 60% of people who die from heart disease die within an hour of experiencing symptoms. Although past studies indicated that women were at much lower risk of “sudden death” than men, it appears they’re catching up.
Nearly 6,000 people treated in 27 Danish coronary care units for heart attacks were followed for an average of 32 months. During that time, 1,261 died of heart disease, 536 of whom were victims of sudden death. Researchers at Denmark’s National Institute of Public Health in Copenhagen found that, after accounting for age differences, men’s risk of sudden death was only 1.3 times higher than women’s risk.
“I think women are getting closer to the male risk ... because their lifestyle is becoming more like men’s ... women work as much and, in Denmark, smoke as much as men,” says Dr. Steen Abildstrom, the lead author of the study. The findings were published in the November issue of the journal Heart.
In the United States, sudden death has decreased in both sexes, writes Dr. William J. Groh and his colleagues at the Indiana University School of Medicine in an editorial accompanying the study. However, because the decrease in women is significantly less than men, the women are catching up, Groh says.
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Mammograms may be valuable well past age 70
Most medical organizations agree that screening mammography should begin at age 40. Now researchers suggest that healthy women well into their 70s would be wise to have annual mammograms. Breast cancer increases with age and is highest in women 75 to 79 years old.
In an analysis of data from more than 12,000 women older than 69 with breast cancer, researchers confirmed that women 75 and older were more likely to be diagnosed with advanced disease than those between 69 and 74 years of age. The older women also were significantly less likely to have had annual mammograms.
The good news is that those older women who had two or more annual screenings before diagnosis had smaller tumors, the same as younger women. Among women who did not get mammograms, 38% of the younger group and 49% of the older women had tumors greater than 2 centimeters, says Dr. James S. Goodwin, a study coauthor and director of the Sealy Center on Aging at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. The study was published in the Nov. 19 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.
