People who follow vegetarian or vegan diets may have lower odds for heart disease but higher chances of having a stroke, compared to meat eaters, a large UK study suggests.
Researchers followed 48,188 middle-aged adults without any history of heart attacks or strokes for about 18 years. During this time, 2,820 people developed coronary artery disease that can lead to heart attacks; 519 people had ischemic strokes, the most common kind, which occur when a clot blocks an artery carrying blood to the brain; and 300 people had hemorrhagic strokes, which are caused by a ruptured blood vessel in the brain.
Vegetarians - including vegans, who avoid eggs and dairy - were 22% less likely to develop coronary artery disease than meat eaters. This is the equivalent of 10 fewer cases of artery disease per 1,000 people over a decade among vegetarians compared to meat eaters, researchers calculated.
However, vegetarians and vegans were 20 percent more likely than others to have a stroke - particularly a hemorrhagic stroke. This translates over 10 years to roughly three more strokes per 1,000 people in vegetarians than in meat eaters.
"Both fish eaters and vegetarians had on average lower BMI, and lower rates of high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol and diabetes compared with meat eaters, which might explain the lower risk of heart disease in both fish eaters and vegetarians since these are all established risk factors for heart disease," said study leader Tammy Tong, a nutritional epidemiologist at the University of Oxford in the UK.
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