Ladies, lay off the carbs for your heart

A new study published on April 12 in the  Archives of Internal Medicine, an international peer-reviewed journal of the American Medical Association (AMA), shows that women who overload on simple carbohydrates are more likely to develop heart disease.

Italian researchers found that "consuming carbohydrates with high glycemic index, an indicator of how quickly a food affects blood glucose levels, appears to be associated with the risk of coronary heart disease [CHD] in women but not men."

Sabina Sieri, PhD, a biologist specializing in diet and nutrition at the Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, a national cancer research foundation in Milan, Italy, and team of researchers surveyed nearly 50,000 participants throughout Italy using a dietary questionnaire and relative risk models. Two-thirds of the participants were females. The researchers identified "during a median of 7.9 years of follow-up" that 463 developed CHD.

The researchers concluded, "one-fourth of women whose diet had the highest glycemic load had 2.24 times the risk of heart disease compared with the one-fourth of women with the lowest glycemic load" and "tentatively suggest that the adverse effects of a high glycemic diet in women are mediated by sex-related differences in lipoprotein and glucose metabolism, but further prospective studies are required to verify a lack of association of a high dietary glycemic load with cardiovascular disease in men."

Full study, "Dietary Glycemic Load and Index and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease in a Large Italian Cohort: The EPICOR Study": http://archinte.ama-assn.org/