Healthy diet & CVD: recommendation for practioners

Editorial

Diet and cardiovascular disease

In most cases, cardiovascular diseases don’t occur by accident. Lifestyle has an important part to play, not only in its occurrence but also in prevention. We all know the risk factors that we have to avoid – smoking, having a sedentary lifestyle, being overweight, stress, and so on… But we should also list all the things we can do to stack the odds in our favour, particularly in terms of healthy eating.

This is shown in the first article based on the work of Hever, reminding us that a healthy diet should be based on vegetable products, supplemented by a moderate amount of animal products to provide diversity.

The Spanish team that carried out the SUN study of over 19,000 subjects demonstrated that those scoring highly on the consumption of vegetables, fruit, fish and fibre reduced their risk of cardiovascular disease by up to 69%.

To close the demonstration, the work recently published by Aune shows that an intake of 800 g of fruit and vegetables per day has cardiovascular benefits. The circle is complete.

Data such as this cannot remain unheeded. It is time to give consumers – whether healthy or otherwise – the keys to changing their eating habits.

See next article