"We then used records from the Swedish national healthcare system to determine whether the women went on to be hospitalized or to die from heart failure," explains Levitan. "We compared women with diets most similar to the DASH diet to women with diets that were not similar and found that those women whose diets most closely resembled DASH had the lowest risk of heart failure."

Their analysis showed that during the seven-year follow-up, 443 women developed heart failure, including 415 who were hospitalized and 28 women who died of the condition. Compared with the one-quarter of women with the lowest DASH diet scores, the one-quarter of the women with the highest DASH diet scores had a 37 percent lower risk of heart failure after factors such as age, physical activity and smoking were taken into account. More dramatically, the women with DASH scores in the top 10 percent had fully half the rate of heart failure compared with the one-quarter of participants with the lowest scores.

Of particular note, adds Levitan, a woman's diet did not have to precisely mimic the DASH diet in order to be of benefit. "Very few of the women we looked at had diets that shared all aspects of the DASH diet," she adds. "But we found that the closer they were, the lower their risk of heart failure. This suggests that making even moderate adjustments to your diet to include more fruits, vegetables, whole grains and low-fat dairy products, and less salt and sugar and less red meat and processed meats, can help improve cardiac health."

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