Vegetarians a third less likely to suffer heart disease, UK study shows

Vegetarians were 32 per cent less likely to be admitted to hospital or die from heart disease than people who ate meat and fish, scientists at Oxford University reported.

The researchers followed nearly 45,000 adults, a third of them vegetarians, for an average of 11 and a half years and accounted for factors such as their age, whether they smoked, alcohol consumption, physical activity, education and socio-economic background, according to the study published on Wednesday in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

In the 50 to 70 age group, 6.8 per cent of study participants who ate meat or fish were sent to hospital or died from heart disease, compared to 4.6 per cent of vegetarians.

The study, dubbed the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC), is the largest of its kind in Britain.

"Probably most of the difference is accounted for by the fact that the vegetarians had lower cholesterol and lower blood pressure," said Francesca Crowe, one of the authors of the study and a nutritional epidemiologist at Oxford. "Diet is an important determinant of heart disease."

Ninety-seven per cent of the participants were Caucasian, said Crowe, but there was no difference in the results for different ethnic groups. "There is no particular reason why it would not be generalisable to vegetarians in other population groups," she said.

Cardiovascular disease is the biggest cause of death in developed countries and accounted for an estimated 17.3 million deaths in 2008 worldwide, including 6.2 million deaths from strokes, according to the World Health Organisation.