According to a study from the University of Oxford, the risk of hospitalisation or death from heart disease is 32% lower in vegetarians than meat eaters.
Published on Wednesday in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the analysis looked at almost 45,000 volunteers from England and Scotland, 34% of whom were vegetarian. The researchers accounted for factors such as age, alcohol intake, educational level, physical activity, smoking and socioeconomic background, and having such an unusually large proportion of vegetarian participants – which is rare in studies of this kind – allowed them to make more precise estimates of the two groups.
According to the British Heart Foundation, more than 65,000 people died from coronary heart disease in 2010 in England – more than for any other disease. The main forms of the disease are heart attack and angina. The new findings suggest that a vegetarian diet could significantly reduce people’s risk of heart problems such as these.
“The results clearly show that the risk of heart disease in vegetarians is about a third lower than in comparable non-vegetarians,” said Professor Tim Key, co-author of the study and deputy director of the Cancer Epidemiology Unit, University of Oxford.
The vegetarians in the study had lower blood pressures and cholesterol levels than the non-vegetarians and this is thought to be the main reason behind their reduced risk of heart disease.
Funded by Cancer Research UK and the Medical Research Council, and carried out by the Cancer Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford, the study is the largest in the UK to date comparing rates of heart disease between vegetarians and meat eaters.
