Whole Grain Diet Can Reduce Heart Disease And Stroke Risk; Experts Claim

A new study has recently revealed that eating more whole, and fewer white, refined ones, can help significantly lower the diastolic blood pressure and reduce the risk of heart disease in overweight and obese adults under the age of 50. The study, published in the Journal of Nutrition, also said that whole grain diet may reduce the risk of death from heart disease by about a third.

Health reported that the findings claim that whole grains can be a major regulator of blood pressure and may give an effective nutritional strategy to reduce cardiovascular-related deaths and disorders. "We went to a fair amount of length and detail to try to eliminate as many things as we could that have, in the past, interfered with our ability to draw conclusions," says lead author John Kirwan, Ph.D., director of the Metabolic Translational Research Center at the Cleveland Clinic's Endocrinology & Metabolism Institute. "In the end, it's as close as you can get to a definitive answer to the question of what whole grains can do for your heart."

For the study, a group of 33 overweight and obese participants were asked to follow two different diets. During the first eight-week period, they were given foods with high whole-grain content, and for the second eight-week period they got foods made with primarily white flour and refined grains. Economic Times also reported that at the beginning and end of each diet period, study participants spend three days in a clinical research setting for a series of metabolic testing where researchers recorded their weight, body fat percentage, blood pressure, cholesterol, and other measures of metabolic and cardiovascular health.

Participants under medication for hypertension were told to maintain their medication usage throughout the study. While on the whole grain diet, researchers found that participants saw a three-fold improvement in their diastolic blood pressure, which is the lowest pressure when your heart relaxes between beats, compared to when they were on the refined grain diet, reported Indian Express.

This improvement reflects the reduced risk death from heart disease by almost one-third and the risk of death from a stroke by two-fifths, which is a much larger impact than what Kirwan expected. "It was quite remarkable, and a very important message especially for this age group," he says. Experts revealed that for adults under 50, the most significant predictor of cardiovascular disease is elevated diastolic blood pressure, while systolic pressure becomes more important for those over 50.

Meanwhile, Kirwan says the results of the study should be particularly helpful to those who have cardiovascular risk factors, like obesity or high blood pressure, but that they can apply to healthy, normal-weight people as well.

"The cardiovascular benefits we've seen here, across the board in terms of glucose metabolism, body composition, blood pressure, and other measures, were all positive," he says. "This is one strategy that pretty much anyone can use to maintain a healthy metabolic profile and attenuate your risk for chronic disease," said Kirwan.