Drink coffee and eat plants to strengthen your heart
By Sam Downing|
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If you want a healthier heart (and who doesn't?), drinking more coffee and eating more plants could make a huge difference.
That's according to two studies presented to the American Heart Association this week, which revealed links between coffee consumption and plant-based diets and a lowered risk of heart failure.
RELATED: How to convert to a plant-based diet (without crawling back to meat)
The first study examined the health outcomes of people who ate a mostly plant-based diet, compared to four other dietary patterns:
Convenience (those who ate a lot of red meats, pastas, fried potatoes, fast foods); Sweets (desserts, breads, sweet breakfast foods, chocolate, candy); Alcohol/Salads (salad dressings, green, leafy vegetables, tomatoes, wine, butter, liquor); and Southern (eggs, fried food, organ meats, processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages), an American-style diet linked to particularly bad health effects.
Those who mostly stuck to a plant-based diet had a 42 percent decreased risk of developing heart failure over the four years of the study.
“Eating a diet mostly of dark green leafy plants, fruits, beans, whole grains and fish, while limiting processed meats, saturated fats, trans fats, refined carbohydrates and foods high in added sugars is a heart-healthy lifestyle," said Dr Kara Lynn, first author of the study, in a statement.
"[A mostly plant-based diet] may specifically help prevent heart failure if you don't already have it."
RELATED: Ground rules for being an energetic vegetarian
The study is observational, meaning it only observes a link between plant-based diets and good heart health — it doesn't directly prove the former causes the latter.
The second study observed another link between cardiovascular health and coffee — which, of course, is another plant-based food.
The research found that every additional cup per week is associated with decreased risk of developing heart failure by 7 percent (and stroke by 8 percent) compared with non-coffee drinkers.
RELATED: 9 health benefits of coffee (to justify your wild caffeine addiction)
Confused about what's healthy and what's not? Dr Libby Weaver makes sense of it: