High cholesterol diets can be even more damaging for young people's heart health than those more commonly thought at risk, a new study has suggested.
Scientists at the University of Cambridge tested diets high in fat and cholesterol on mice over their lifetimes, measuring how it affected their risk of developing atherosclerosis. They then backed this up by analyzing data from a human study.
Atherosclerosis is a condition where plaques build up in the arteries and blood vessels, so they become stiffer and narrower, elevating the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
It is a major cause of heart disease, which is a significant cause of death in the United States; a fifth of deaths were due to heart disease in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Heart disease risk factors, such as atherosclerosis, are usually a concern among older adults, but this mice study has suggested that early prevention is key.
The link between diet and atherosclerosis has been studied in mice before. Previously, scientists tended to feed the mice a high-fat diet for several weeks and then examined how this led to the buildup of plaques.
However, this team of researchers decided to measure what happened when they gave mice the same amount of high-fat food at different points during their life spans to compare how that impacted their atherosclerosis risk.
"When I asked my group and a number of people who are experts in atherosclerosis, no one could tell me what the result would be," Professor Ziad Mallat, the lead author and British Heart Foundation (BHF) Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine said in a statement.
"Some people thought it would make no difference; others thought it would change the risk. In fact, what we found was that an intermittent high fat diet starting while the mice were still young—one week on, a few weeks off, another week on, and so on—was the worst option in terms of atherosclerosis risk.
"Atherosclerosis can potentially be prevented by lowering cholesterol levels, but we clearly need to start thinking about this much earlier on in life than we previously thought."
Fluctuating levels of cholesterol appeared to cause the most damage to the mice's health, which Mallat said could explain why some people who are on statins but don't take them regularly remain at increased risk of heart attack.
"If you stop and start your statin treatment, your body is being exposed to a yo-yo of cholesterol, which it doesn't like, and it seems this interferes with your body's ability to prevent the build-up of plaques," said Mallat.
Once the scientists had tested the effects of high-cholesterol diets on mice, they backed up their findings with data from the Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns Study, one of the largest follow-up studies into cardiovascular risk from childhood to adulthood.
Participants who had been recruited in the 1980s returned for follow-ups over several decades, and more than 2,000 of them had received scans of their arteries when they were aged around 30 years old and again at 50.
The researchers found that those who had been exposed to high cholesterol levels as children tended to have the most significant plaque buildup—confirming their findings from the mouse study.
Cheese, eggs, shellfish, red meat, organ meats, fried foods, processed meats, butter, heavy cream and ice cream are among the foods with high cholesterol levels.
Nutrition experts are divided on whether dietary cholesterol causes the buildup of plaque characteristic of atherosclerosis or whether a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet is effective at preventing heart disease.
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Reference
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