\u201cPromoting an overall healthy eating pattern rather than strict macronutrient restriction should be a central strategy for primary prevention of heart disease,\u201d lead author Zhiyuan Wu, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told STAT about the macronutrients carbohydrates and fats. \u201cWe should focus on overall diet quality, which may also offer flexibility for individuals to choose eating patterns that can align with their preference while still supporting heart health.\u201d<\/p>\n
These dietary choices mattered to heart health in the study, as measured by the medical outcomes of more than 200,000 people followed for more than 30 years. Low-carbohydrate and low-fat diets rich in high-quality carbohydrates and plant-based sources of proteins and fats were associated with about a 15% lower risk of CHD compared to other diets with lower-quality carbs and fats.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Less-direct measures from these participants\u2019 blood samples filled out that picture, too. Triglycerides and inflammation markers were lower while \u201cgood\u201d cholesterol was higher. Metabolic biomarkers \u2014 think amino acids, lipids, and gut microbes \u2014 were found at beneficial levels in biological pathways linked to better health.<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\t\tWe tested the government\u2019s official new AI nutrition tool: Grok<\/a><\/p>\n How one defines a \u201chigh-quality\u201d diet is now a matter of debate, given the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2025-2030 released earlier this year. Under health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins, the new recommendations discarded the work of a scientific advisory committee<\/a> whose late 2024 report emphasized consuming vegetables, fruits, legumes (as in beans, peas, lentils), whole grains, nuts, and fish and seafood throughout the lifespan. Low-fat and non-fat dairy (cow or alternative) as well as unsaturated fats were encouraged in their report, while red or processed meats, saturated fats, and salty or sugary snacks were discouraged, along with sweetened beverages and foods.<\/p>\n The current guidelines<\/a> upended the food pyramid, placing a rib-eye steak at the top left, above a salmon filet that sits alongside whole milk. \u201cWe are ending the war on saturated fat,\u201d Kennedy said<\/a>. \u201cOur government declares war on added sugar today.\u201d<\/p>\n Few would argue with eliminating added sugar. In the JACC paper, the term \u201crefined carbohydrates\u201d refers to foods with added sugar as well as white bread or prepared desserts found on supermarket shelves, Wu said.<\/p>\n As for saturated fats, Andrea Deierlein, director of public health nutrition at the NYU School of Global Public Health, reminds us that the new guidelines still maintain longstanding advice to limit saturated fats to no more than 10% of calories consumed. She served for two years on the scientific committee whose recommendations were rejected by USDA\u2019s Rollins as guided by \u201cleftist ideologies.\u201d <\/a>\u00a0(That report remains still available<\/a>, she said.)<\/p>\n There may be a disconnect between what\u2019s pictured on the pyramid and what\u2019s advised in the new guidelines distributed by the Trump administration, she said in an interview. She was not involved in the JACC study.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIn previous dietary guidelines, the message was always limiting added sugar, limiting sodium, limiting intakes of refined carbohydrates, and emphasizing whole grains and whole fruits and vegetables,\u201d she said. \u201cThat messaging would still be, to me, very similar to what they\u2019ve come up with now of talking about limiting processed foods.\u201d<\/p>\n As for the JACC study, she said both low-carb and low-fat diets can be beneficial when people focus on healthy sources of proteins and fats and carbohydrates.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere are many ways of combining those foods to create a healthy dietary pattern when focusing on beans, peas, legumes, fruits and vegetables, lean animal proteins,\u201d she said. \u201cIf you\u2019re consuming lean fats from lean animal sources or from low-fat dairy,\u00a0that\u2019s not going to impact too much.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n There are caveats to keep in mind about the JACC study. Participants came from the long-running Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, Nurses\u2019 Health Study, and Nurses\u2019 Health Study II. They may ot be representative of the wider population, and their answers about what they ate came from frequent food questionnaires relying on their recollections of what they ate, which could be inaccurate. Medical records and blood tests supplied other data.\u00a0<\/p>\n Wu said the study\u2019s results reinforce previous research supporting the DASH diet, designed to lower blood pressure, and the Mediterranean diet, as well as recommendations from the American Heart Association.<\/p>\n Next on Wu\u2019s agenda: identifying what a heart-healthy diet might be for people with different genetic backgrounds, different gut microbiomes, or different metabolomic or proteomic profiles.<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe this idea of trying to figure out the exact macronutrient composition of something isn\u2019t as necessary as focusing on the actual foods that we\u2019re eating, those foods that are present in many different dietary patterns that have all been associated with health benefits,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n STAT\u2019s coverage of chronic health issues is supported by a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies<\/a>. Our financial supporters<\/a> are not involved in any decisions about our journalism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Food fights pitting low-carbohydrate diets against low-fat diets are off the mark when they aim at heart health,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":469372,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[7199,97,269,986,5599],"class_list":["post-469371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nutrition","tag-cardiovascular-disease","tag-health","tag-nutrition","tag-obesity","tag-public-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/469372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}