Dr. McDougall's Online Discussion Board

Would like to get people's opinion on this study and the reasons for positive association with higher legume consumption and CVD.

Legume consumption and risk of all-cause, cardiovascular, and cancer mortality in the PREDIMED study
Conclusions
These findings support the benefits of legumes consumption for cancer mortality prevention which may be counterbalanced by their higher risk for CVD mortality.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... uffer#sec4

The study was on people with high CVD risk to begin with. It could be that since they weren't dying of cancer, they died of CVD later on. I wish I had access to the full text. Jeff would probably know.

When looking at all of the Blue Zone groups, one of the most commonly shared food among them all is legumes......qed

BlueGene wrote:The study was on people with high CVD risk to begin with. It could be that since they weren't dying of cancer, they died of CVD later on. I wish I had access to the full text. Jeff would probably know.

I just found this pdf manuscript of the study. don't have time to read it now but will be back later.

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... IMED_study

As usual the devil is in the details. What's left out are those important details. Exactly what was the diet these people followed? No data. What were the correlations between legumes and other items such as meat or dairy? No data. It might be instructive to know if the people consuming more legumes consumed other heart unhealthy items. I guess it might be interesting to measure total legume consumption but in a vacuum it doesn't mean anything.
The correlations within the blue zones is far more valuable to me as a consumer as we had researchers looking at their diets as a culture.
f1jim

Yes, they even state in the study that the higher correlation with dried legumes may be because the study population traditionally eat these beans with processed meats in a stew.

The lowest tertile ate the most processed meat, red meat, olive oil, alcohol, and fat and died of cancer the most. The highest tertile ate the most fish, vegetables and fruits, and died of CVD the most.

Table 1:

looking at that table 1
seems the highest bean tertile had more CVD burden at baseline
more antihypertensive meds, more statins
more oral diabetic pills (some of these are known to increase risk of cvd mortality)
higher cholesterol
maybe they ate more beans coz they were already sick
and were trying to adopt a healthier diet?

nice to know such a small amount of beans daily can reduce cancer mortality risk

I listened to a presentation on this last week at a conference & I believe it was one of the study authors and he hypothasized that the intestinal gas could create additional pressure on a diseased arterial system to explain the association. Another attendee wondered if beans are most often eaten in the culture (spain I think it was) with ham.

intestinal gas from on average an ounce of beans daily?
plus wouldnt the table 1, show more "ham"/processed meat consumption in the highest bean eating group?
if they collected the data accurately?
or are they now guessing?
hence the bean gas causing heart attacks hypothesis. (is this why dr. McD says only a cup of beans a day?)
that one is worthy of further study for sure.
im starting to think this study aint worth the paper.
something certainly smells funny
yknow, intestinal