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One More Reason to Drive by the Drive-Thru Window
May 31, 2001 -- Fast-food meals are quick and easy but no matter how we justify it we all know they're loaded with fat that can raise your cholesterol and add unwanted and unhealthy pounds. Now there's another reason to restrict how much junk you eat, say researchers from Australia.
The picture painted by Paul J. Nestel, MD, and colleagues is pretty gruesome. After a simple meal of a ham and cheese sandwich with butter, and a serving of whole milk and some ice cream, the ability of the body's arteries to expand and accommodate the blood and fat traveling through them is reduced by about 25%.
That means instead of stretching easily like an elastic band the arteries stiffen, putting them at high risk of clogging and causing a heart attack or stroke. Even worse, this scenario takes place within hours of eating a high-fat meal and is repeated each time a similar meal is eaten.
Nestel, who conducted the artery-stiffening experiment on 32 healthy volunteers, says frequent eating of high-fat meals may lead to permanent changes and abnormal function in heart arteries that increase the risk for heart attack and death.
He reports the findings in the June issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
In the experiment, 16 people ate the sandwich, milk and ice cream meal (totaling 50 grams of fat) and 20 people ate a low-fat meal of cereal with low-fat milk, bread with low-fat spreads and fruit (totaling six grams of fat).
"The amount of fat that our subjects ate for breakfast was about half a day's average intake by American men," says Nestel, of the Baker Medical Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia. To put this amount into perspective, the American Heart Association recommends a diet that restricts total fat intake to less than 30% of calories. That would allow a moderately active man of average stature to take in about 70-75 grams of fat per day, putting the average American man, according to Nestel, far above this goal.
The researchers used blood tests and ultrasound imaging to check levels of fats and cholesterol in the blood after the meals and measure the ability of the arteries to expand.
The arteries were virtually unaffected by the low-fat meal, but the effect of the high-fat meal was evident within three hours after eating and peaked at six hours. Surprisingly, fat and cholesterol in the blood were not significantly affected by the high-fat meal. The main effect was on the ability of the arteries to expand, Nestel reports.
"It means that the meals we often eat, commonly referred to as 'fast-food,' or even those we eat at home are taking a terrible toll on our [blood vessels]," says Robert A. Vogel, MD, who commented on the study for WebMD. "A Happy Meal [from McDonald's] is roughly the equivalent of smoking two cigarettes."
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