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High-fat diets, even short ones, can produce severe inflammation in the fat tissue around blood vessels, perhaps leading the way to cardiovascular disease, a recent study revealed.
The research, published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation Research, discovered that the fat surrounding people’s coronary arteries can be highly inflamed, which could produce blood-vessel inflammation, an important part of atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries.
The scientists, led by Neil Weintraub, of the University of Cincinnati (UC), and his colleagues there and at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, also found that mice fed a high-fat diet – similar to what many Americans eat – for just two weeks experience an increase of inflammation in the fat tissue surrounding their arteries.
“This is independent of weight gain or blood lipids – cholesterol levels,” said Weintraub, senior author of the study and chairman of UC’s cardiovascular diseases division.
It’s already known, he said, that fatty diets can increase cholesterol levels in the blood, contributing to atherosclerosis. But the new research, he continued, suggests why many patients who eat a lot of fatty foods don’t have abnormal blood cholesterol or triglyceride levels but still develop hardening of the arteries. That’s because fatty diets inflame blood vessels, “mediated by the fat cells surrounding the blood vessel wall.”
“[The high-fat diet] produced striking abnormalities of the fat tissue surrounding blood vessels in a very short period of time,” he said. “This is a warning to those who say there isn’t a problem because their weight and cholesterol levels are under control. Lipid profiles [of cholesterol and other fatty substances in the blood] don’t hold all the answers.
“Bad dietary habits can lead to a number of problems, and this suggests that a high-fat diet is detrimental in ways we didn’t previously understand.”
Weintraub said scientists don’t as yet have a way of gauging how fatty diets affect fat tissue around blood vessels.
“We don’t know why these cells are so responsive to high-fat diets,” he said. “We must now conduct further experiments to answer these types of questions.”
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