Eating fish instead of steak tonight sharply cuts your risk of a heart attack tomorrow morning, a doctor has reported.
New studies suggest that high-fat meals put the blood into a hypercoagulation state within six or seven hours, raising the risk that dangerous artery-clogging blood clots will occur. Low-fat meals quickly reverse that."If you take fat out of your diet, you don't have to wait years to lower your risk of heart disease," said Dr. George J. Miller of the Medical Research Council in London said Wednesday.
Researchers have known that high-fat diets will, over time, raise blood cholesterol levels, increasing the risk of a heart attack. But the very short-term effect of high-fat meals on blood clotting hasn't been appreciated, Miller said.
The idea that a low-fat supper such as broiled fish can lower heart-disease risk the next morning should help doctors persuade patients to cut the fat out of their diets, he said.
Dr. H. Bryan Brewer of the National Institutes of Health agreed that the link between fatty foods and hypercoagulation is becoming increasingly important.
"It certainly is a risk factor people are beginning to look at," he said. "The recent studies suggest it may be an important one to consider now in risk-factor evaluation."
"In Western societies, most of us take our main meal of the day in the evening," Miller said. He reported his findings at the American Heart Association's annual science writers' conference.