Good news: You can reverse heart disease.
The bad news? You’ll need to start eating right, starting in your 30s.
According to a new study from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, people who start making dietary changes in their 30s and 40s may actually reverse the progression of heart disease–regardless of how bad they ate in the past.
For lead investigator Bonnie Spring, this study shows there’s still hope for those who didn’t pay attention to their health in the past.
“It’s not too late,” says Spring, a professor of preventive medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “You’re not doomed if you’ve hit young adulthood and acquired some bad habits. You can still make a change and it will have a benefit for your heart. Adulthood is not too late for healthy behavior changes to help the heart.”
The study, which was published in the health journal Circulation, examined 5,000 adults who had previously participated in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study 20 years earlier, when they were in their 20s. This study examined their health now between the ages of 38 to 50 to see how certain factors affected their heart disease risk.
Researchers first checked to see if they were obese, had exercised regularly, or adopted certain healthy eating habits, such as getting more fiber into their diet. Afterward, they examined the calcification in their coronary arteries, a precursor to heart disease.
For those who had followed an unhealthy lifestyle but then made healthy lifestyle choices after their 20s, good news prevailed: The development of heart disease was actually reversing.
But for those who continued these bad habits, their risk of heart disease continued to increase.
“That loss of healthy habits had a measurable negative impact on their coronary arteries,” says Spring. “Each decrease in healthy lifestyle factors led to greater odds of detectable coronary artery calcification and higher intima-media thickness.”
In turn, Spring suggests that following the healthy habits the participants practiced in the study–such as eating a healthy diet and exercising regularly–could too reverse signs of heart disease. Better yet, it won’t involve you taking drugs or other unknown chemicals; a win win for everyone.
What You Should Do
Unlike other diseases, there’s good news for those at risk for heart disease: It’s reversible. So what lifestyle changes should you make? Simple, say researchers–eat a diet high in fiber, low in sodium, and rich in vegetables and fruits, while avoiding bad lifestyle habits, such as excessive drinking. Exercising at least 30 minutes a day can also help reverse heart disease for good.
“Adulthood isn’t a ‘safe period’ when one can abandon healthy habits without doing damage to the heart,” says Spring. “A healthy lifestyle requires upkeep to be maintained.”
In addition, other lifestyle habits, such as avoiding cigarettes and keeping your weight at a normal body mass index (BMI), can do wonders for reducing your heart disease risk, say researchers.
Readers: What other changes have you made to your diet to improve your health?
Source:
Heart Disease Reversed, Research Article Suggests – NYDailyNews.com
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