TORONTO — Eating a so-called western diet rich in meat, fried foods and salty snacks significantly raises the risk of having a heart attack in people around the world — whether they live in Canada, China or Chile, a study of dietary patterns suggests.

While a diet that’s high in fat and animal protein and short on fruit and vegetables has long been a recognized scourge in North America and Europe when it comes to heart health, the study found that such regular mealtime fare has a similarly negative impact in other parts of the world.

“What we found was that if you ate a westernized diet, no matter which country you’re in, then it’s bad for you,” said senior author Dr. Salim Yusuf, director of the Population Health Research Institute at McMaster University. “And if you ate a prudent diet, no matter which country you’re in, it was good for you.”

A western diet was found to increase the risk of heart attack by 35 per cent, while a prudent diet — one that includes lots of fruits and vegetables — cut the risk by 30 per cent, the researchers said.

“The good diet seemed to be protective irrespective of which region of the world you came from, and the bad diet seemed to be harmful irrespective of which region you came from,” Yusuf said Monday from Hamilton.

To conduct the study, published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, the researchers analyzed data from the Interheart study, which documents how various factors are associated with heart attack risk in about 16,000 participants in 52 countries.

In this paper, they looked at 5,761 individuals who had experienced a heart attack, comparing them to 10,646 people without known heart disease. Subjects were given a dietary questionnaire, based on 19 food groups and adjusted for food preferences for each country.

“A simple dietary score, which included both good and bad foods with the higher score indicating a worse diet, showed that 30 per cent of the risk of heart disease in a population could be related to poor diet,” lead author Romania Iqbal said in a release.

The researchers also looked at what was dubbed an Oriental diet, which has a high intake of tofu, soy and other sauces, but found no relationship with heart attack risk, despite its elevated levels of salt.

“The salt would have an impact on stroke and this study is not looking at strokes,” Yusuf said. “The other thing is the Oriental diet may have some things that are good and some things that are bad. For instance, the soy sauce and may be bad, but the Oriental diet is also low in animal meat and is also relatively higher in vegetables.”

Toronto cardiologist Dr. Beth Abramson said the research is important because it shows, in large numbers of people from around the world, that different dietary patterns are associated with different risks of heart attack.

“It’s a large international study that I would say reconfirms what is suggested in the literature in smaller studies that we are what we eat,” she said.

“We really need to pay attention to a cardio-protective diet or a heart-healthy diet which is low in fat, high in fibre and high in vegetables and fruits,” said Abramson, a spokeswoman for the Heart and Stroke Foundation, who was not involved in the study.

Yusuf said that while the link between a high-fat diet and heart attack has been known for some time in western countries like Canada, “what we didn’t know was that this kind of impact is there in every region of the world.”

The message, he said, is simple:
“Eat lots of fruits and vegetables and reduce the amount of fried food, salty foods and animal meat. It will help you. It’s almost what your grandmother told you to do and it’s nice that science is reinforcing it.”