Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease With the Vegetarian Diet: the CARDIVEG Study

Nutrition is able to substantially alter the health status of the general population. In industrialized countries such as Italy the most important association between diet and health is certainly the relationship with cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death and disability. The ability to identify with certainty, therefore, the relationship between diet and cardiovascular disease appears to be a key element in the implementation of specific primary prevention strategies.

Cardiovascular diseases would be the result of interactions between genetics and environmental factors. Many studies have evaluated the associations between food groups, foods, or nutrients and chronic diseases, and a consensus about the role of nutritional factors in the etiology of common diseases, such as cardiovascular and neoplastic diseases, has gradually emerged. Recent studies have been focused on examining the impact of a whole dietary approach rather than on isolating single nutrients; it is recognized that analyses of single nutrients ignore the important and complex interactions between components of a diet and, more importantly, because people do not eat isolated nutrients.

The optimal dietary strategy for the prevention of chronic degenerative diseases remains a challenging and a highly relevant preventive health issue. Over the last years, numerous evidence on the existing relationship between nutrition and chronic degenerative diseases have led investigators to search for the optimal dietary pattern to maintain a good health status. Several models of diet have been imposed on public attention, but those that got the most interest are certainly Mediterranean and vegetarian diets. These dietary patterns seem to exert protective effects on blood pressure, lipid profiles, cardiovascular diseases and metabolic parameters.

The term Mediterranean diet has been widely used to describe the traditional dietary habits of people in Crete, South Italy, and other Mediterranean countries during the decade of the 1960s. Since the first data from the Seven Countries Study, several studies in different populations have established a beneficial role for the main components of the Mediterranean diet on the occurrence of cardiovascular diseases and chronic degenerative diseases. This dietary pattern is characterized by plentiful plant foods (fruits, vegetables, breads, other forms of cereals, beans, nuts, and seeds), olive oil as the principal source of fat, moderate amounts of dairy products (mainly cheese and yogurt), low to moderate amounts of fish and poultry, red meat in low amounts and wine consumed in low to moderate quantities, usually with meals.

The vegetarian diet is a diet that excludes the use of animal foods (meat, fish) in its fresh, preserved and/or processed. The increase in the number of vegetarians is attributable to health, ethical, environmental, and social concerns.