Study: Following healthy diets found to reduce the risk of acquired hearing loss by 30% 遵循健康的飲食習慣，可以將獲得性聽力損失的風險降低30％

Wednesday, April 28, 2021 by: Virgilio Marin

Editor’s note: You may have alrady known that a healthy diet is not only important for patients who suffer cancer, heart disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and depression, but also health health conditions that are not defined as diseases such as hearing loss.

What constitute a healthy diet? A healthy diet is not just what you eat. It includes the types of foods you use, how you prepare them, how much you use them, and when you use them. A healthy diet should contain a full range of all sorts of nutrients. And the foods used should be prepared in ways that help retain nutrients maximally while not causing much of any toxic chemicals, A healthy diet should be consumed in right quantity and during a right time frame.

編者註：您可能已經知道，健康飲食不僅對罹患癌症，心髒病，糖尿病，代謝綜合症和抑鬱症的患者非常重要，而且還對諸如聽力損失之類受到較少關注的健康狀況非常重要。 什麼構成健康飲食？ 健康的飲食不僅是您吃什麼食物。 它包括您使用的食物類型，準備方式，使用量以及使用時間。 健康的飲食應包含各種營養。 而且所用的食物應以有助於最大程度保留營養素的方式製備，而又不會引起任何有毒化學物質。應以正確的數量和在正確的時間範圍內食用健康的飲食。

(Natural News) A study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology suggests that following a healthy diet may help ward off acquired hearing loss. A team led by Brigham and Women’s Hospital researchers examined middle-aged women and found that the odds of developing hearing loss is 30 percent lower in those who adhere to a healthy diet.

Adherence to a healthy diet linked to lower risk of hearing loss

Acquired hearing loss refers to the total or partial inability to hear sounds that develop after birth. It occurs for various reasons, including ear infection, meningitis, measles, head injury, exposure to loud noise and aging.

Past studies linked higher intake of certain nutrients such as beta-carotene (found in carrots, legumes and other foods) and omega-3 fatty acids (found in fatty fish) to a lower risk of self-reported hearing loss. The researchers wished to learn more about this connection by tracking people’s diets and measuring changes in their hearing sensitivity over a long period of time.

To do so, the researchers studied 20 years of dietary intake information from over 3,000 women with a median age of 59 who were included in the Nurses’ Health Study II. Using this information, they examined how closely the women’s long-term diets resembled the Alternate Mediterranean diet (AMED), Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH diet) and Alternate Healthy Index-2010 (AHEI-2010). 

AMED is a version of the Mediterranean diet adapted to reflect eating patterns that are linked to a lower risk of chronic disease, while the DASH diet is intended to control and prevent high blood pressure. On the other hand, AHEI-2010 is based on the 2010 U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans and shares similar components with AMED and the DASH diet.

Past studies linked adherence to these diets to a lower risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, hypertension and premature death.

To measure the participants’ hearing sensitivity over the course of three years, the team put up 19 testing sites across the country and trained audiologists to measure changes in the participants’ pure-tone hearing thresholds – the lowest and highest pitch (frequency of a sound) that a person can detect in one ear.

The researchers found that the odds of hearing loss in the mid-frequencies were nearly 30 percent lower in the women whose dietary patterns resembled the three diets, compared to those whose diets least resembled them. Meanwhile, the odds of hearing loss in higher frequencies were up to 25 percent lower. The frequencies encompassed in these associations, according to the researchers, are critical for speech understanding.

“We were surprised that so many women demonstrated hearing decline over such a relatively short period of time,” said Sharon Curhan, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the lead researcher of the study.

After only three years, nineteen percent of the participants had low-frequency hearing loss, 38 percent had mid-frequency hearing loss, while nearly half had high-frequency hearing loss. (Related: Age-related hearing loss halted with folate nutrient.)

“The mean age of the women in our study was 59 years; most of our participants were in their 50s and early 60s. This is a younger age than when many people think about having their hearing checked,” she added.

The researchers plan to continue tracking the participants with repeated hearing tests and are currently investigating ways to collect high-quality information for future studies across diverse populations.

Learn more about the basics of a healthy diet at FoodCures.news.

Sources include:

ScienceDaily.com

ASHA.org

Academic.OUP.com