LONDON: Eating a Nordic diet rich in game, berries, and fish can lower your cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart disease, a new study finds.
While the Mediterranean diet, with its olive oil, fish, and fresh vegetables, has long been touted as the ideal eating plan for reducing heart disease, scientists in Finland have found an alternative closer to home.
“Acceptance of the Mediterranean diet has not been easy in other parts of the Western world, probably due to difficulties in changing dietary patterns, cultural differences in taste and limited accessibility to various foods,” said head researcher Matti Uusitupa, from the institute of public health and clinical nutrition at the University of Eastern Finland. “A health enhancing regional Nordic diet has therefore been proposed as an alternative to the Mediterranean diet.”
The study involved 166 obese patients from Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland who either ate their regular diet or a Nordic diet. While both groups consumed the same number of calories, the Nordic diet followers ate plenty of local produce, such as berries, root vegetables, legumes, and cabbage. They also ate three fish meals per week, as well as nuts, game, whole grain products and rapeseed oil. Those who ate their regular diet consumed butter and fewer berries and vegetables, and had no restrictions on red meat and white bread intake.
After 24 weeks those in the control group showed little change in the level of so called “bad” cholesterol, or LDL-C, in their blood stream while those on the Nordic diet showed a four percent drop. Results also showed an increase in the “good” cholesterol, HDL-C. For comparison, studies on the Mediterranean diet have shown that it can reduce cholesterol by between six and nine percent.
Subjects on the Nordic diet also reduced the levels of chemicals that cause inflammation in the blood, which has been linked to heart disease and type II diabetes.
Findings, announced this week are published in Journal of Internal Medicine.
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