Key takeaways:

• Diet quality may be the most important factor in choosing a heart-healthy diet.
• Healthy versions of low-carb or low-fat diets were linked to reduced risk for coronary heart disease.

Adherence to healthier versions of low-fat or low-carb diet patterns may be more cardioprotective compared with focusing on macronutrients or animal or vegetable intake, researchers reported.

A prospective study evaluating the link between low-carb and low-fat diet quality and coronary heart disease among U.S. adults was published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

“Low-carbohydrate and low-fat diets are widely practiced in the U.S., yet the effects of low-carbohydrate and low-fat diets on reducing heart disease risk is a topic of ongoing debate. We designed this study to fill this critical research gap about how low-carbohydrate and low-fat diets with differential emphases of the quality of food sources affect heart disease risk,” Zhiyuan Wu, PhD, postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told Healio. “Moreover, we integrated diet, metabolomic, clinical risk markers and disease outcome data in this research, allowing us to directly link what people eat, how the human body responds to these diets, and the risk of developing coronary heart disease. The needs for long-term follow-up data and biological insights linking diet and heart health are the main reasons we conducted this study.”