Practicing Nutritional Prudence

In the world of politics, jingos and catch phrases are like clothing fads: they come and go. Yesterday’s “flip-flop,” is today’s “change.” Reagan’s “government is the problem,” is today’s “government that works for you.” And anyone that watched Dana Carvey and his frequent lampooning George H.W. Bush Saturday Night Live has to remember the unforgettable “Wouldn’t be prudent.”

“Prudent” has since made a comeback, but it’s now making waves in the health world after a recent study shows that a prudent diet is best for avoiding heart disease.

A team of researchers pooled together heart health related data from over 16,000 people in 52 different countries to see how impactful diets were on one’s risk of heart attack (approximately 5,800 of the participants had had a heart attack prior to the study, while 10,600 of the participants had no prior history of heart related issues).

Obviously, diets tend to vary from one person to the next, so the researchers boiled down the diets to three general types based on similarities seen among the foods eaten according to the participants’ country of origin. One such diet was the prudent diet. The prudent dieters were those that ate a lot of fruits and vegetables; the Western dieters (as in Western hemisphere) were those that ate high amounts of fried and processed foods; the Oriental dieters were those that ate high amounts of Asian cuisine (including those foods high in sodium like soy sauce).

The researchers had the participants complete a questionnaire where they were asked to answer the kinds of foods they typically ate; the questionnaire had a listing of example food products that corresponded to one of the three general types (Oriental, Prudent or Western). The food selections had scores attached to them; the higher the score, the worse the participants’ diets.

After controlling for various risk factors and assessing each person’s health prior to the study, the researchers found that one’s diet accounts for a third of one’s risk for heart attack. For instance, their study suggests that those who ate a prudent diet had a 30 percent decreased risk of a heart attack, while those who ate a Western diet had a 35 percent increased risk of a heart attack. There was no increased or decreased risk for a heart attack, according to their results, among those who consumed a primarily Oriental diet (they say the high amounts of sodium in many Oriental diets likely offset any cardiovascular benefit that comes from eating foods low in cholesterol and fat, like tofu, for example).

This study isn’t earth shattering by any means, but it further hammers home the importance of adopting a prudent (which is to say a diet that exercises “caution or circumspection as to danger or risk”) diet, instead of a diet that’s become synonymous with the Western world: fried. A prudent diet is a bulwark against heart attack risk.

I very rarely advise never eating something; I’m more of an “everything in moderation” guy. Fried foods are an exception to that rule. If at all possible, AVOID eating fried foods. It doesn’t matter what it is, if something is fried, it’s going to taste better (I often say you can fry a boot and it would taste good). But as the saying goes, don’t let the smooth taste fool you: what may taste good couldn’t possibly be worse for you and your heart.