Healthy living Take it to heart
Risk factors for cardiovascular disease, which causes around a third of all deaths globally, can be reduced through changes in diet. But the medical profession isn’t doing enough to address the nutritional challenges many people face. Ellys Earls speaks to Dr Tom Butler, a senior lecturer in Nutrition and Health at Edge Hill University and head of the British Association for Cardiovascular Prevention’s Diet Working Group, to fi nd out what needs to change and where to start.
D
r Tom Butler has been fascinated by the link between nutrition and cardiovascular health since his undergraduate degree in
human biology. His dissertation project looked at the effects of eating fat and sugar on the heart. He took this research further for his PhD, investigating what happens at the molecular level and how what you eat can regulate cell death and directly impact the disease process of conditions like hypertension. It’s well documented that the risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD) can be reduced through changes in diet and physical activity. A diet rich in fruit, vegetables, olive oil and nuts is widely recognised in clinical guidelines as being important in both primary and secondary prevention of heart conditions. You might expect that this knowledge – combined with the increasing prevalence of CVD and the deaths associated with it – would have led to nutrition becoming an important part of its
Ingredients Insight /
www.ingredients-insight.com
treatment and prevention. However, cases of CVD doubled from 271 million in 1990 to 523 million in 2019, while the number of deaths from cardiovascular conditions increased from 12.1 million to 18.6 million in the same time frame, equating to around a third of all deaths globally. It’s no surprise then that Butler believes there is still a long way to go.
It was only at his insistence that nutrition was made a mandatory module for the master’s degree in cardiovascular health and rehabilitation at the University of Chester, where until recently he was programme lead for BSc Nutrition and Dietetics. “People aren’t having heart attacks because of a lack of exercise. It’s a contributing factor, but it’s also because of exposure to poor lifestyle choices over the last 20, 30, 40 years and we don’t do much to address some of these nutritional lifestyle challenges that people face,” he says.
49
udra11/
Shutterstock.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112
