Whole grain intake helps prevent cardiac events, death
05 Mar 2023
It was found that those who consumed a higher intake of whole grains were at a lower risk of heart problems.Whole grain consumption, instead of refined grains, provides a protective benefit against coronary heart disease (CHD), cardiovascular disease (CVD), and all-cause mortality, suggests a study.
A team of investigators accessed the databases of PubMed, Embase, and Web of Science until 15 March 2022. They used random-effects models to calculate summary relative risks (RRs) and 95 percent confidence intervals (CIs), and restricted cubic splines to assess potential linear or nonlinear relationships. Meta-evidence quality was rated using the NutriGrade tool.
Twenty-four articles (68 studies: 46 for whole grains and 22 for refined grains) including 1,624,407 participants met the eligibility criteria.
Each 30-g increase in daily whole grain intake correlated with RRs of 0.98 (95 percent CI, 0.96‒1.00) for stroke, 0.94 (95 percent CI, 0.92‒0.97) for CHD, 0.97 (95 percent CI, 0.89‒1.07) for heart failure (HF), 0.92 (95 percent CI, 0.88‒0.96) for CVD, and 0.94 (95 percent CI, 0.92‒0.97) for all-cause mortality.
Whole grain intake also showed a linear association with CHD (pnonlinearity=0.231) and a nonlinear interaction with CVD (pnonlinearity=0.002) and all-cause mortality (pnonlinearity=0.001).
“Except for a positive correlation between refined grain consumption and all-cause mortality in the restricted cubic spline, no significant influence of refined grain intake on stroke, CHD, HF, and CVD was detected,” the investigators noted.
Notably, the meta-evidence quality was moderate for the association of whole grain intake with stroke, moderate with CHD, low with HF, high with CVD, and high with all-cause mortality. All meta-evidence quality for refined grains was low.
“Relationships between consumption of refined grains and health outcomes should be interpreted cautiously because of the low quality of meta-evidence,” the investigators said.