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 “Among individuals who consume red meat, chicken, or fish regularly,
our findings imply that avoiding the use of open-flame and/or
high-temperature cooking methods, including grilling/barbecuing,
broiling, and roasting, may help reduce hypertension risk,” Dr. Gang
Liu of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston told
Reuters Health by email.
“Although some studies have suggested that higher intake of red
meat, especially processed red meat, is associated with higher risk
of hypertension, the associations of chicken or fish intake with
hypertension risk remain inconsistent,” he explained. “These
previous studies did not take into account one important factor -
different meat cooking methods.”
Dr. Liu presented the new findings at an American Heart Association
meeting in New Orleans last week.
He and his colleagues analyzed cooking methods and the development
of hypertension in adults who regularly ate beef, poultry or fish
and were participating in three long-term studies: 32,925 women in
the Nurses' Health Study, 53,852 women in the Nurses' Health Study
II, and 17,104 men in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study.
In each study, detailed cooking information was collected. None of
the participants had hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, or
cancer at the start, but 37,123 people developed hypertension during
an average follow-up of 12 to 16 years.
The researchers found that "a higher frequency of open-flame and/or
high-temperature cooking and a preference for higher meat doneness
level were both independently associated with an increased
hypertension risk.”
Among adults who ate two or more servings of red meat, chicken or
fish a week, the risk of developing hypertension was 17 percent
higher in those who grilled, broiled, or roasted the meat or fish
more than 15 times per month, compared with fewer than four times
per month.
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The risk of hypertension was 15 percent higher in those who
preferred their food well done, compared with those who preferred
rarer meats.
"The chemicals produced by cooking meats at high temperatures induce
oxidative stress, inflammation and insulin resistance in animal
studies, and these pathways may also lead to an elevated risk of
developing high blood pressure," Dr. Liu said in a conference
statement.
Registered dietitian and American Heart Association spokesperson Dr.
Linda Van Horn from Northwestern University in Chicago said previous
studies on this topic have mostly involved charbroiled red meat and
have focused on the potential association with cancer.
This new study, she told Reuters Health by phone, “begins to suggest
that grilling at high temperatures really does have some sort of
inflammatory response in the blood system that basically then
contributes to an increased risk of all kinds of chronic disease,
not only cancer,” she said.
The study wasn't designed to prove that eating meat and fish cooked
a certain way causes hypertension.
Still, said Dr. Van Horn, “Speaking as a nutritionist, my caution
would be not to cook foods to death. I think where we have problems
is when people take a good thing too far and that is certainly true
for almost everything in the world of nutrition. In this case,
certainly this doesn't say eat steak tartare and sushi the rest of
your life, but rather more on the side of moderation, don't grill it
to death and if you do happen to get charring, you might consider
cutting off those burnt spots as much as possible.”
SOURCE: https://bit.ly/2pCdkOA AHA Epidemiology and Prevention,
Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health Scientific Sessions, March 21,
2018.
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