Go ahead, sink your teeth into a juicy burger every one and a while. It's not going to hurt your heart, afterall.
That's the surprising finding from Johns Hopkins researchers.
Their study also shows that low-carb, high fat diets aren't harmful either, at least in the short term.
It may not seem like the typical meal you'd use to study heart health, but that's exactly what researchers at Johns Hopkins University did.
They had a group of more than forty overweight adults eat a 900 calorie McMeal--then took a close look at their arteries.
"We found no evidence that eating at least a single high fat meal had an adverse affect on vascular health," said Johns Hopkins Exercise Physiologist Kerry Stewart.
The McDonald's challenge was part of a larger study of low-carbohydrate diets and their effect on heart health. Weight loss plans like Atkins and South Beach claim to help users drop pounds fast, but how the heart reacts to high-fat, carb-free living wasn't known.
The same group was then assigned to either a low-carb or low-fat diet plan for six months.
"They would have the same amount of calories so that at the end of the day the difference would be not how much weight they lost but how they achieved that weight loss," Stewart said.
The low-carb group lost ten pounds nearly a month faster than the low-fat group.
"There were absolutely no differences between the groups in terms of these vascular measures that we looked at," said Stewart.
Researchers say combining this finding--with those of the McDonald's meal study--proves high-fat, low-carb diets don't hurt the heart over a short period of time.
What they don't know is whether it's healthy in the long run.
The participants were also part of a supervised exercise program and they did not have fast food every day.
The study is still ongoing.
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