Healthy foods more important than type of diet to reduce heart disease risk: Researchers compare three popular diets and find all three reduce heart injury

Everyone knows achieving or a healthy body weight one key to preventing disease. But even don't agree way to achieve researchers at Beth Israel Medical Center (BIDMC) examined effects of Healthy foods more three healthy emphasizing different macronutrients -- or unsaturated fats -- a biomarker directly heart injury. Using specific tests, consistent with heart health. "It's possible macronutrients matter less than eating healthy foods, MD, Professor of Medicine at and Harvard Medical School.

Your headline (Single polypill reduces risk of heart attacks and strokes, study finds, 23 August) should really have been tempered by quoting the absolute rather than the relative risk-reduction figures. The 34% reduction in major cardiac events you quote is calculated from “on the ground” reduction in events from 8. 8% over five years in those not on the polypill to 5. 9% in those receiving it – that is a 2. 9% chance of benefit over five years to the individual and with no effect on mortality. Archie Cochrane , the doyen of effects of heart disease evidence-based medicine, said we should ask three questions of any intervention: can it work, does it work and is it worth it? The relative risk reduction you quote tells us of population benefit and answers the first two questions, but it is the absolute risk reduction that answers the “is it worth it?”question. Many patients would be reluctant to take a tablet if told there was a greater than 97% chance that they would derive no benefit from taking it over five years and it had no positive effect on their length of life.

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