Cereal Linked to Heart Health

Eating whole-grain cereals at least seven times a week brings down your risk of heart failure, a study released Friday in Florida said.

There are good and powerful arguments for eating a whole-grain cereal for breakfast, said Dr. Luc Djousse, author of the study and an assistant professor at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

The significant health benefits of whole-grain cereal are not just for kids, but also for adults. A whole-grain, high-fiber breakfast may lower blood pressure and bad cholesterol and prevent heart attacks.

For the study, cereals that contained at least 25 percent oat or bran content were considered whole-grain cereals.

The study was presented at the American Heart Association’s 47th Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention.

It showed that people who ate a whole-grain cereal seven or more times per week were 28 percent less likely to develop heart failure than people who never ate such cereal. The risk decreased by 22 percent in those who ate the cereal two to six times a week, and by 14 percent in those who ate it once a week.