Take note: If you eat a lot of simple carbs, you are hurting your heart. Plain and simple.
A new study published in today’s Archives of Internal Medicine studied 47,000 Italian adults and found that women who eat more white bread, white rice and pizza had double the risk of heart disease.
Those foods all have a high glycemic index, which means that they raise the levels of blood sugar quickly. The “white foods” – white flour and sugar and many foods made with them – are all high on the glycemic index.
The researchers studied 15,171 men and 32,578 women who have completed dietary questionnaires for many years. The same effect was not found in the men, though the men had more heart problems overall.
From BBC News:
The researchers found that the women whose diet had the highest glycemic load had more than double the risk of heart disease compared with those women with the lowest glycemic load. (Those with diabetes were excluded from the study.)
The authors concluded: "Thus, a high consumption of carbohydrates from high-glycemic index foods, rather than the overall quantity of carbohydrates consumed, appears to influence the risk of developing coronary heart disease."
The researchers believe that a high-glycemic diet may dampen 'good' cholesterol levels in women more than in men.
From CNN Health:
Only carbohydrates with a high glycemic index appear to hurt the heart. Carbs with a low glycemic index – such as fruit and pasta – were not associated with an increased risk of heart disease, which suggests that the increased risk is caused "not by a diet high in carbohydrates, but by a diet rich in rapidly absorbed carbohydrates," says the lead author of the study, Sabina Sieri, of the Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, a national institute for cancer research in Milan, Italy.
The glycemic index ranks on a scale from 1 to 100 how quickly (or slowly) carbohydrates affect your blood-sugar levels. (White bread scores 100.) Foods that rank below 55 are considered to have a low glycemic index and produce only small fluctuations in blood glucose and insulin levels; foods that rank above 70 are said to have a high glycemic index and tend to cause unhealthy spikes in blood sugar.
During the eight years after the subjects filled out their questionnaires, 463 people in the study – 65 percent of them men – experienced heart problems (including heart attacks), had angioplasty or bypass surgery, or died of heart-disease-related causes.
The women who reported eating the most carbohydrates had twice the risk of developing heart disease as their counterparts who consumed the fewest carbs.
When the researchers broke the carbs into high and low glycemic index categories, the increased risk was even more apparent: Women who ate the most high glycemic foods had about 2.25 times the risk of developing heart disease than women who consumed the fewest. (To isolate the effect of the carbs on heart health, the researchers took body weight, physical activity, saturated fat intake, smoking, and a range of other health factors into account.)
More from the BBC:
Victoria Taylor, senior heart health dietician at the The British Heart Foundation, said that for women, choosing lower GI foods could be useful in helping them to reduce their risk of coronary heart disease.
She said: "They could try broadening the types of bread and cereals they eat to include granary, rye or oat; including more beans, pulses; and accompanying meals with a good helping of fruit and vegetables."
To learn more about the glycemic index, visit this website and click on “database”:
http://www.glycemicindex.com/
The BBC News story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8615537.stm
The CNN Health story:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/12/glycemic.diet.heart/?hpt=T2