Vegan And Vegetarian Diets Could Reduce The Risk Of Heart Disease

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Bella Breakdown

As more people jump on the plant-based diet train, the growing benefits seem much more understandable. While cutting meat out of your diet is good for your cholesterol it’s plant-based diets that are great for your heart.

New research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association is showing more evidence that plant-based diets are associated with a decreased risk of cardiovascular disease. A team from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH) and the University of Minnesota School of Public Health analyzed data of over 12,000 men and women who participated in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study.

During the initial enrollment and the third follow-up visit, each participant completed a food and beverage frequency questionnaire. From there, researchers conducting annual telephones calls and monitoring different records determined what cardiovascular disease problems each participant had suffered and if and when the participants had died.

Unfortunately, the ARIC study did not specifically ask if participants had followed a “plant‐based diet,” but another research team led by Rebholz used the answers from the food and beverage frequency questionnaire to calculate several different measures of plant-based diets.

What the measures showed was that those who had scored in the top 20% were 16% less likely to have developed cardiovascular disease, 31% to 32% less likely to have died from cardiovascular disease, and 18% to 25% less likely to have died from anything.