Prevention, not treatment
In an editorial comment, Ramon Estruch, MD, PhD, from the Hospital Clinic in Barcelona, and colleagues suggested that it might be time for better dietary guidelines.
“A better knowledge of health protection provided by different foods and dietary patterns, mainly their anti-inflammatory properties, should provide the basis for designing even healthier dietary patterns to protect against heart disease,” the editorialists wrote.
They added extra-virgin olive oil, fatty fish, and tomatoes to the list of foods with “established anti-inflammatory activity.”
In a comment, Dr. Estruch said the findings of this new study are confirmatory of the PREDIMED trial, which showed a reduction in risk of major CV events in individuals at high cardiovascular risk assigned to an anti-inflammatory Mediterranean diet pattern supplemented with extra-virgin olive oil or nuts as compared with those assigned to a reduced-fat diet.
“The study of Jun Li et al. confirms that an anti-inflammatory diet is useful to prevent cardiovascular events and, more important, that healthy dietary patterns may be even healthier if subjects increase consumption of foods with the highest anti-inflammatory potential,” he said, adding that “mechanistic explanations add plausibility to the results of observational studies.”
Dr. Estruch was the principal investigator of PREDIMED. This trial was originally published in 2013 and then retracted and republished in 2018, with some required corrections, but the results had not materially changed.
Dr. Li is supported by grants from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and Boston Nutrition Obesity Research Center. Dr. Estruch disclosed no financial relationships relevant to the contents of this article.
A version of this article originally appeared on Medscape.com.