Study Suggests Med Diet Benefits Cardiovascular Health of Firefighters

A recent study by sci­en­tists from Harvard University’s TH Chan School of Public Health found that adher­ence to the MEDI-Lifestyle sig­nif­i­cantly reduced the risk of hyper­ten­sion and improved aer­o­bic capac­ity in America’s young fire­fight­ers.

The study, which was pub­lished in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, sug­gested that intro­duc­ing healthy lifestyle habits, includ­ing the Mediterranean diet, in fire train­ing acad­e­mies could help boost the ben­e­fits of firefighter’s phys­i­cal train­ing and improve their car­dio­vas­cu­lar health.

U.S. fire­fight­ers have been iden­ti­fied as being at high risk of car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease and sud­den car­diac death due to the stren­u­ous nature of their work cou­pled with con­ven­tional risk fac­tors, includ­ing obe­sity and high blood pres­sure.

The researchers believe that if this study was fol­lowed up with fur­ther research it could lead to the Mediterranean diet and other lifestyle changes being pro­moted as a ben­e­fi­cial new approach to bet­ter health in fire­fight­ing acad­e­mies.

The study focused on almost 100 new recruits from two dif­fer­ent fire­fight­ing train­ing cen­ters. The vol­un­teers, who were mostly males with an aver­age age of 25.6 years, were required to com­plete MEDI-Lifestyle ques­tion­naires in order to assess their lifestyles.

Participants answered ques­tions about their weight, sleep pat­terns, adher­ence to a Mediterranean diet, smok­ing habits, phys­i­cal activ­ity and num­ber of hours spent watch­ing tele­vi­sion.

A point was awarded for each healthy char­ac­ter­is­tic and a score of between five and seven was con­sid­ered to be good. Participants with the least healthy lifestyles achieved scores of between zero and two.

Higher scores were found to be linked to increased phys­i­cal fit­ness and less body fat. It was also dis­cov­ered that higher scor­ing recruits were less prone to hyper­ten­sion and for every extra point scored the risk of hyper­ten­sion fell by 36 per­cent.

A high MEDI-Lifestyle score also increased aer­o­bic capac­ity. Every extra point scored was noted to dou­ble aer­o­bic capac­ity. High lev­els of phys­i­cal activ­ity and plenty of sleep were also noted as con­tribut­ing fac­tors to bet­ter aer­o­bic capac­ity.

“Our results sug­gest that fire acad­emy inter­ven­tions designed to increase healthy lifestyle habits over­all could add addi­tional ben­e­fits to the phys­i­cal fit­ness train­ing tra­di­tion­ally pro­vided in acad­emy set­tings,” co-author Stefanos N Kales told News Wise.

Kales co-authored an ear­lier study in 2014, which con­cluded that a Mediterranean-style diet was ben­e­fi­cial for reduc­ing the risk of heart dis­ease and meta­bolic syn­drome in par­tic­i­pat­ing fire­fight­ers.

However, this was the first study to focus on the ben­e­fi­cial effects of a mod­i­fied Mediterranean-style diet in young U.S. fire­fight­ers. Previous stud­ies had con­cen­trated on older peo­ple, par­tic­i­pants with pre-exist­ing health con­di­tions and Mediterranean pop­u­la­tions.

This ini­tial study first sparked the idea that edu­cat­ing American fire­fight­ers on the ben­e­fits of the Mediterranean diet and encour­ag­ing them to improve their dietary habits could be an effec­tive way to improve their over­all health and reduce their risk of car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease.

The 2014 study con­cluded that fire­fight­ers who fol­lowed the mod­i­fied Mediterranean-style diet were less prone to be obese, had lower body fat and were more phys­i­cally fit. Obese fire­fight­ers and those whose diets were rich in fast foods and sug­ary bev­er­ages scored lower than fire­fight­ers with healthy eat­ing habits and those of nor­mal weight.

Participants who adhered to the mod­i­fied Mediterranean-style diet also reported lower lev­els of LDL (bad) cho­les­terol and higher lev­els of HDL (good) cho­les­terol, which sug­gested a lower risk to heart dis­ease and a 35 per­cent reduced risk of meta­bolic syn­drome com­pared to low scor­ing par­tic­i­pants.

• Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine
• News Wise