Dietary-atherosclerosis study on deceased persons. Relation of selected dietary components to raised coronary lesions

Dietary histories for 253 deceased New Orleans men were obtained retrospectively by interviewing respondents who had shared the household with these men for an average of eighteen years. Each respondent answered a detailed questionnaire designed to elicit the usual twenty-eight-day pattern of food intake of the subject during the terminal year of his life. This information was then used to calculate the average daily intake of selected dietary components. The cases included in the dietary studies were a sub-sample of cases in the International Atherosclerosis Project and were also studied for cigarette smoking habits. Analyses were performed to determine possible associations of nutrient intakes during the terminal year of life with the extent of raised lesion involvement in the three main coronary arteries measured at autopsy. These analyses indicated that higher intakes of protein of vegetal origin, total carbohydrate, starch, and crude fiber are associated with less atherosclerotic lesion involvement. For other components (total calories, total protein, animal protein, total fat, animal or vegetal fat, saturated or unsaturated fatty acids, total sugars, and cholesterol), there were no indications that the daily consumption was related to atherosclerotic lesions found at autopsy. When the diet-lesion relationships were examined on the basis of nutrient-to-calorie ratios, starch and vegetal protein were associated with less atherosclerotic lesion involvement in the coronaries, while animal protein and fat, regardless of source, were associated with greater atherosclerotic lesion involvement. These results suggest that, in general, the consumption of more foods of vegetal origin may be related to a lesser degree of atherosclerotic involvement.