People who eat their fish fried may fail to gain the benefits from the healthy food and increase their risk of stroke, according to new findings.
A US study, which looked at dietary habits of 21,675 people found that those who ate more fried fish were as likely to suffer a stroke than those who did not.
The Reasons for Geographic And Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study enrolled participants across the United States, age 45 or older, between January 2003 and October 2007.
Twenty one per cent were from the “stroke buckle”, the coastal plain region of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia with stroke death rates even higher than in the rest of the stroke belt; 34 per cent were from the rest of the stroke belt, while the remaining participants were from other states.
“These differences in fish consumption may be one of the potential reasons for the racial and geographic differences in stroke incidence and mortality,” said study author Fadi Nahab, from the Emory University in Atlanta and a member of the American Academy of Neurology.
Participants were interviewed by phone, given an in-home physical examination and questioned about their consumption of oysters, shellfish, tuna, fried fish and other fish that was not fried.
Fewer than one in four participants said they ate two or more servings of non-fried fish per week, while African-Americans were more than three-and-a-half times more likely to eat two or more servings of fried fish per week than Caucasians.
The researchers found that those living in the stroke belt were 30 per cent more likely to eat two or more servings of fried fish than those in the rest of the country. Those in the stroke buckle were 17 per cent more likely to eat two or more servings of fried fish.
For non-fried fish, those in the stroke belt ate an average of 1.45 servings per week, compared to 1.52 servings in the stroke buckle and 1.63 servings in the rest of the country.
Neurology December 22 2010
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