Healthnotes Newswire — Recommendations made by doctors to their female patients regarding diet and exercise have been shown to be effective in reducing heart-disease risk in a number of clinical trials, according to a paper published this month in Nutrition Reviews.¹ The report also looked at studies that focused specifically on women of color; while only a few such studies were found, the results were considered promising. Although the benefits of exercise and diet for reducing cardiac risk are well known, most of the research and media attention has focused on men. The importance of this new report is that it provides a foundation upon which gender and ethnic disparities in health and health care can potentially be reduced in the years ahead.

In this paper, the authors reviewed the results of 32 different protocols in which women were given lifestyle recommendations or diet counseling, or both, with the goal of reducing the risk of heart disease. Modest but statistically significant reductions in weight, dietary fat, and serum cholesterol were seen in women counseled about diet. Reductions in weight and blood pressure, as well as an increase in physical activity, were seen in women counseled about exercise. Studies that combined diet and exercise recommendations tended to show more benefit than studies that focused only on one intervention or the other.

Unfortunately, the improvements in cardiac risk factors tended to diminish with time. For example, studies that lasted longer than six months produced smaller benefits than did studies of shorter duration. That observation suggests that some patients may have had difficulty staying with the program. Nevertheless, the improvements seen in this study could have enormous implications for improvement of the public health.

A significant finding from this study was that recommendations made to ethnically diverse groups of women are likely to have the greatest impact if they are tailored in such a way as to be culturally relevant to the women being counseled.

This report underscores the importance of a new government-sponsored program in the United States, Healthy People 2010, which has set the following goals: by the year 2010, (1) 85% of doctors will counsel their patients about exercise and (2) 75% of visits to the doctor made by patients with heart disease, diabetes, or elevated cholesterol levels will include advice or education related to diet and nutrition.