Traditional Southern Diet May Increase Risk of Heart Attack

If tradition Southern cuisine is a staple in your diet, your heart may be suffering for it. Regularly eating a Southern-style diet could significantly raise the risk of heart attack or heart-related death, according to a new study in the journal Circulation.

“Following multivariable adjustment, participants in the highest quartile of consumption of the Southern dietary pattern experienced a 56% greater hazard of incident coronary heart disease compared with those in the lowest quartile of consumption of this pattern,” says lead researcher James M. Shikany, DrPH, a nutritional epidemiologist in the Division of Preventive Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
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None of the other 4 dietary patterns studied were associated with an increased risk of heart disease.

Shikany and his colleagues analyzed data from participants in the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study, which included more than 17,000 white and African-American men and women ages 45 or older.

Researchers grouped the types of foods the participants regularly ate into 5 dietary patterns:

• the “convenience” pattern—comprised mostly of pasta dishes, Mexican food, Chinese food, mixed dishes, and pizza.

• the “plant-based” pattern—mostly vegetables, fruits, cereal, beans, yogurt, poultry, and fish;

• the “sweets” pattern—consisting of added sugars, desserts, chocolate, candy, and sweetened breakfast foods.

• the “alcohol/salads” pattern—characterized by beer, wine, liquor, green leafy vegetables, tomatoes, and salad dressings.

• the “Southern” pattern—including added fats, fried food, eggs and egg dishes, organ meats, processed meats, and sugar-sweetened beverages.

Participants were screened by phone and then given an in-home physical exam and food frequency questionnaire that asked how often and how much, on average, they consumed the foods during the previous year. Every 6 months, the participants reported their general health status and hospitalizations via phone interview for nearly 6 years.

The most frequent consumers of the Southern diet tended to be male, African-American, and those who had not graduated from high school or were residents of Southern states (North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana).

“Based on our results, it would be prudent to advise those who report usually consuming a Southern-type dietary pattern to move away from this pattern by recommending such things as eating fewer fried foods and processed and organ meats and drinking fewer sugar-sweetened beverages,” Shikany says. “These types of changes are easier for people to make than asking them to completely eliminate specific foods from their diets.”

For example, instead of consuming processed meats with breakfast every day of the week, patients could be advised to reduce this to 2 or 3 days a week as a start. Likewise, patients who typically consume 3 or 4 sugar-sweetened beverages per day could be advised to reduce this to just 1 per day.

“Guiding patients to consume more of the plant-based dietary pattern may be advisable because of its lack of an association with risk of coronary heart disease in this study,” Shikany says. “There are no known risks associated with these recommendations, and they may favorably influence the risk of incident coronary heart disease.”

—Colleen Mullarkey

Reference

Shikany JM, Safford MM, Newby PK, Durant RW, Brown TM, Judd SE. Southern dietary pattern is associated with hazard of acute coronary heart disease in the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study. Circulation. 2015 Aug 10. [Epub ahead of print].