Try the less is more diet: Study says little changes have the biggest impact
By Daniel Martin
It could be dubbed the 'less is more' diet.
Making tiny changes to your daily food consumption is all it takes to have a big impact on your health, a study has found.
Experts say around 20,000 lives a year could be saved if Britons simply tweaked their diet to include one gram less of salt a day, an extra piece of fruit and less saturated fat.
The findings will encourage those put off dieting by elaborate and often confusing regimes such as the Atkins diet, which has four 'phases' and is based on consuming protein-rich food.
Dieticians warn that Britons need to transform their eating habits, with around a quarter of the population classed as obese - so fat their health is in danger. According to current trends, that could rise to more than half the population by 2050.
The research by teams at Oxford and Liverpool universities, compared dietary patterns against deaths from heart disease in Britons aged 25 to 84.
The condition is the country's biggest killer with 270,000 Britons suffering a heart attack every year.
The scientists then calculated the impact of lower cholesterol and blood pressure among the population caused by small adjustments to our diets.
Excess salt is known to increase blood pressure, while saturated fats and trans fats - the so- called 'hard' fats found mostly in foods such as pies, biscuits and ready meals - can damage blood vessels, increasing the risk of a clot that can cause a heart attack or stroke.
The study concluded that up to 21,360 lives would be saved every year if Britons ate one gram of salt less a day, one extra piece of fruit or vegetables and got one per cent more of their energy intake from unsaturated fats, rather than saturated or trans fats.
'There would be 8,335 fewer coronary heart disease deaths among men and 6,480 among women,' the researchers said in a report on their findings presented at the annual conference of the American Heart Association in San Francisco today.
'There would also be 2,535 fewer stroke deaths in men and 4,010 in women.'
It is estimated that more than half the fall in deaths would be caused by eating less trans fat. The study said: 'About 31 per cent [of the reduction] would be due to increased fruit and vegetable consumption and 8 per cent to decreased saturated fat intake.'
The average guideline daily amount of saturated fat is 30 grams for a man and 20 grams for women and children over 5. Some studies suggest adults living in Scotland and the north of England may be regularly consuming double that amount.
