STUDIES: FATTY DINNERS RAISE HEART RISK FAST

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, January 21, 1993                   TAG: 9301210033
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MONTEREY, CALIF.                                LENGTH: Medium
STUDIES: FATTY DINNERS RAISE HEART RISK FAST
Eating fish instead of steak tonight sharply cuts your risk of a heart attack tomorrow morning, a doctor reported Wednesday.
New studies suggest that high-fat meals put the blood into a hypercoagulation state within six or seven hours, raising the risk that dangerous artery-clogging blood clots will occur. Low-fat meals quickly reverse that.
"If you take fat out of your diet, you don't have to wait years to lower your risk of heart disease," said Dr. George J. Miller of the Medical Research Council in London.
Researchers have known that high-fat diets will, over time, raise blood cholesterol levels, increasing the risk of a heart attack. But the very short-term effect of high-fat meals on blood clotting hasn't been appreciated, Miller said.
The idea that a low-fat supper such as broiled fish can lower heart-disease risk the next morning should help doctors persuade patients to cut the fat out of their diets, he said.
Dr. H. Bryan Brewer of the National Institutes of Health agreed that the link between fatty foods and hypercoagulation is becoming increasingly important.
"It certainly is a risk factor people are beginning to look at," he said. "The recent studies suggest it may be an important one to consider now in risk-factor evaluation."
Most heart attacks occur in the early morning. There may be several reasons, Miller said, but one could be that high-fat dinners put the blood into a hypercoagulation state by the following morning.
"In Western societies, most of us take our main meal of the day in the evening," he said.
Miller's studies have shown that fatty meals activate a blood clotting substance called factor VII. He described it as the fuse that sets off an explosion of blood-clotting chemicals in the blood.
Miller's studies of middle-age men in London found that the risk of heart disease was related to blood levels of factor VII.
"The higher the level of factor VII, the shorter the fuse and the larger the explosion of clotting factors," he said.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB