Eating
Legumes Reduces Heart Disease Risks, Says New Review
By Science News Staff / Source
Dietary pulses with or without other
legumes are associated with reduced cardiovascular disease incidence with low
certainty and reduced coronary heart disease, hypertension, and obesity
incidence with very low certainty.
“Cardiovascular disease is the
world’s leading — and most expensive — cause of death, costing the United
States nearly 1 billion dollars a day,” said co-author Dr. Hana Kahleova,
from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and the Institute for
Clinical and Experimental Medicine.
“This review shows that an
inexpensive, accessible, and common pantry staple could help change that:
beans.”
Dr. Kahleova and colleagues searched
the PubMed, MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Cochrane databases through March 2019.
They included prospective cohort
studies that assessed consumption of legumes on the risk for cardiometabolic
diseases and related markers.
They found that those who consumed
the most legumes reduced incidence rates for cardiovascular disease, coronary
heart disease, and hypertension by as much as 10% when compared to those with
the lowest intakes.
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans says that Americans are
not eating enough legumes and recommends eating about three cups per week. The
average American consumes less than a cup a week.
“Americans eat less than one serving
of legumes per day, on average,” Dr. Kahleova said.
“Simply adding more beans to our
plates could be a powerful tool in fighting heart disease and bringing down
blood pressure.”
The review paper was published in the journal Advances in Nutrition.
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Effie Viguiliouk et al.
2019. Associations between Dietary Pulses Alone or with Other Legumes and
Cardiometabolic Disease Outcomes: An Umbrella Review and Updated Systematic
Review and Meta-analysis of Prospective Cohort Studies. Advances in
Nutrition 10, supplement 4: S308-S319; doi: 10.1093/advances/nmz113