High-Fat Diet Could Help Reduce Heart Attack Damage

A new study has revealed that a high-fat diet may actually be beneficial to your health and help to reduce heart attack damage. W. Keith Jones of Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine said, "The study improves the understanding of the relationship between diet and health. Learning about how fat, in the short run, protects against heart attacks could help in the development of better therapies."

During the study, mice were given a high-fat diet (60 percent of calories from animal fat) before experiencing heart attacks. Mice that consumed a high-fat diet for either one day, one week or two weeks before the heart attack experienced about half as much heart damage as mice who ate a control diet. The benefit was greatest among mice that ate a high-fat diet for a week before the heart attack. But in mice that ate a high-fat diet for 6-weeks, the protective effect disappeared. Jones said, "Further research is needed to understand why this is so; the reason may be due to the bad effects of a persistent high-fat diet."

The study is published in the American Journal of Physiology - Heart and Circulatory Physiology.

Source-Medindia