A Vegetarian Diet May Lower Lower Heart Disease Risk by as Much as One Third

If you're amongst the 5% of people in the UK who follows a vegetarian diet, there could be a range of reasons why you choose to avoid meat and fish. However, for some people the decision to limit or avoid animal produce is made as they see this as a healthier option. Indeed a recent piece of research suggests they could be right.

Scientists at the University of Oxford recruited just short of 45,000 people to take part in a study to investigate whether a vegetarian diet can help to lower the risk of developing heart disease. They collected information regarding food choices and known risk factors for heart disease from participants, as well as using hospital records and death registrations to determine who had gone on to experience heart disease and die from it as a result. Those taking part in the study were a mix of meat eaters (66%) and vegetarians (34%) and the findings between the two groups were compared.

The results showed that heart disease was 32% less likely to occur or be the cause of death in vegetarians. Even when other risk factors for heart disease were controlled for, the results still showed that following a vegetarian diet made you less susceptible to the disease.

While the study was generally sound, it had one main flaw - the participants were actively recruited. Unlike research where the subjects are randomly assigned, people were invited to take and it is well known that those that usually volunteer for health studies are already conscious of their health and not a good representative of a group as a whole. While you could argue that vegetarians are largely more concerned for their health, this is not necessarily the case owing to the fact that there are many reasons to avoid meat. You could follow a vegetarian diet, yet rely heavily on cheese and vegetarian convenience food, which are high in saturated fat.

Although it was suggested that following a vegetarian diet was likely to benefit heart disease risk by favourably modifying factors such as cholesterol and blood pressure, conclusions could not be drawn in relation to this, as inadequate data had been obtained - participants were merely invited to have these measured rather than it being a requirement of the study. More research is therefore needed to fill in the gaps in this study.

One question though is whether vegetarians have a lower risk of heart disease due to their avoidance of meat or because they have a higher intake of fruit, vegetables and pulses, which are rich in antioxidants, folate and fibre. Certainly meat can be high in saturated fat if you do not choose lean cuts or opt for more processed products, but beef, pork, poultry, game and offal have a fat content typically lower than 5%. If you continued to eat meat, but chose those low in fat and included plenty of other plant-based foods in your diet, would your likelihood of developing heart disease be as low as someone who is vegetarian? It's certainly an interesting thought.

Photo by Paul Goyette via Wikimedia Commons