Experts Want More Studies of Diet’s Role for the Heart
By GINA KOLATA, NYT
This is a watershed moment in the field of nutrition, medical experts say. For the first time, researchers have shown that a diet can have an effect as powerful as drugs in preventing what really matters to patients — heart attacks, and strokes and deaths from cardiovascular disease.
The subjects were people at high risk of heart disease, and the diet was a Mediterranean one, high in olive oil or nuts.
The study, published last week in The New England Journal of Medicine, is now shaking up the field of cardiovascular medicine, infusing it with optimism. Scientists are calling for similarly rigorous studies of other popular diets that are routinely recommended by cardiologists even though there is little solid evidence that they work.
“We don’t know what the best diet is,” said Dr. Michael Lauer, the director of the division of cardiovascular sciences at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. “This is a great opportunity to come together and use power of the scientific method to get closer to the right answer.”
Other leading experts agreed.
(More here.)
This is a watershed moment in the field of nutrition, medical experts say. For the first time, researchers have shown that a diet can have an effect as powerful as drugs in preventing what really matters to patients — heart attacks, and strokes and deaths from cardiovascular disease.
The subjects were people at high risk of heart disease, and the diet was a Mediterranean one, high in olive oil or nuts.
The study, published last week in The New England Journal of Medicine, is now shaking up the field of cardiovascular medicine, infusing it with optimism. Scientists are calling for similarly rigorous studies of other popular diets that are routinely recommended by cardiologists even though there is little solid evidence that they work.
“We don’t know what the best diet is,” said Dr. Michael Lauer, the director of the division of cardiovascular sciences at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. “This is a great opportunity to come together and use power of the scientific method to get closer to the right answer.”
Other leading experts agreed.
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
So glad that the mainstream media is picking up on the lack of diet studies. The diet advice doctors give is, for the most part, just a guess. Here at NC State, we're working on a big project studying the effect of diet on health http://wp.me/p2Fl7o-93
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