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	ALSO
Chinese tea drinking is art form focused on taste

November 10, 1999
Web posted at: 10:13 a.m. EST (1513 GMT)

ATLANTA (Reuters) -- Chinese researchers presented more evidence Tuesday that the standard Western diet can cause heart disease.

They said people who ate a traditional Chinese diet, based on rice, vegetables and green tea, were much less likely to suffer the physical symptoms of heart disease -- even though they have high rates of smoking.

But when Chinese people moved to Western cities such as San Francisco or Sydney, their arteries started to make the changes that herald heart disease, Dr. Kam Woo of the Chinese University of Hong Kong told a meeting of the American Heart Association.

"Both Chinese and non-Chinese should recognize the potential effects of the traditional Chinese diet," Woo told a news conference.

"They should think about drinking more green tea, eating more vegetables and eating less meat and dairy products."

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Woo started with villagers in Pan Yu, a town in Guangdong province about 100 miles from Hong Kong in southern China, who have one of the lowest rates of heart disease in the world.

He used ultrasound, which uses sound waves, to measure the thickness of the inner walls of the carotid arteries that feed blood to the brains of some of the villagers, and asked them about their dietary habits.

Woo then compared these measurements to westernized Chinese living in Hong Kong, Sydney, and San Francisco. In all, he studied 116 people aged 20 to 60.

The combined thickness of the lining and middle muscle layers of the carotid artery are considered a good indicator of heart disease.

The average carotid inner wall thickness was about one-fifth thinner among the Pan Yu villagers than in the Westernized Chinese, Woo reported.

The Pan Yu villagers ate just under half as much meat and just a tiny fraction of the amount of dairy food as the Western-living Chinese. They ate more vegetables, tofu and drank much more green tea.

For breakfast the villagers would eat congee, or rice porridge, steamed buns containing a small amount of meat and plenty of tea.

"Hardly any ham, bacon, sausage or scrambled egg is eaten in the typical Pan Yu breakfast meal," Woo said.

Other meals included stir-fried or steamed vegetables, a little meat and fish or tofu.

"That is in contrast to fried chicken or fish fillet" in the West, he said.

He said Westerners should not only eat more vegetables and less fatty meat, but should cook Chinese-style more often, steaming or stir-frying foods.

Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.