Lifestyle contributes to a healthy heart.

Lifestyle contributes to a healty heart

Although Seventh-day Adventists generally refrain from drinking alcohol or smoking, diet and exercise apparently contribute the most to their healty cardiovascular profile, scientists say.

Daniel O. Ullmann of the Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland and Colleagues obtained alumni information on 4,342 male physicians graduated from Loma Linda (Calif.) University, most of whom were Seventh-Day Adventists, and compared them with 2,832 male physicians graduated from the University of Southern California, most of whom were not Adventists. The team looked at deaths from 1910 to 1980, finding Adventist physicians had the same risk of fatal cancer but half the risk of fatal stroke or heart disease compared with their non-Adventist peers.

Ullmann and colleagues attribute the differences in heart disease death rates to contrasting lifestyles: When the scientists conducted a random telephone interview of 450 graduates, they found 39 percent of Adventist physicians ate meat less than once a week or not at all and all non-Adventist physicians reported eating meat more than once a week. In addition, Loma Linda graduates ate more fresh fruits and legumes and exercised more vigorously than the non-Adventist physicians surveyed.

In a related report, Dean M. Ornish of the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues continue to show that people with coronary artery disease who adopt major lifestyle changes can reduce some of the plaque that blocks their arteries (SN: 11/26/88, p.348). In a final report on 41 people with severe coronary artery disease, the researchers found 19 out of 22 people assigned to a lifestyle-change group (86 percent) showed overall regression of their atherosclerosis after one year. Scientists asked lifestyle participants to eat a vegetarian diet, exercise regularly and reduce stress by meditating. In contrast, 10 of 19 people in the care-as-usual group (53 percent) showed more narrowing of their arteries after one year.

People who stuck with the demanding regimen of diet, meditation and exercise fared the best. "The more lifestyle changes they made, the more improvement they showed in their arteries," Ornish comments.