The Heart Study Behind 'Three Superfoods' Also Named Kimchi
A wire claim that three superfoods extend life expectancy and prevent heart disease traces to a February 2026 cardiology study that actually credited diet quality, not any specific food. That study's own list of healthy plant foods named kimchi, a detail that disappeared along with the life expectancy claim by the time the finding reached French readers.
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The wire claim promised three superfoods, a specific diet, and a longer life with less risk of heart disease. The study behind it, published February 11 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, said something narrower: quality beats category, whether you cut carbs or cut fat.
Researchers led by Zhiyuan Wu followed 198,473 people across three long-running United States cohorts, the Nurses' Health Study, its sequel NHSII, and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, tracking diet and coronary heart disease over more than 5.2 million person-years and 20,033 cases. Their finding: a low-fat or low-carb diet built from plant-based foods, whole grains, and unsaturated fats tracked with lower coronary heart disease risk. The same diets built from refined carbohydrates and animal-derived fats and proteins tracked with higher risk, regardless of which macronutrient the dieter was cutting.
"It's not simply about cutting carbs or fat," Wu said in the American College of Cardiology's release on the paper. "It's about the quality of foods people choose to construct those diets."
The list that didn't travel
Cardiologist Dariush Mozaffarian of Tufts University's Food is Medicine Institute told NBC News the paper "confirms what we've learned over the last 20 years." NBC's own follow-up, carried by Today.com two months later, asked Penn State nutrition scientist Kristina Petersen for examples of what the study's healthy category actually covers:
- Plant-based foods: beans, sweet potatoes, kimchi, nuts, peanut butter, farro, tofu
- Whole grains: whole wheat bread, brown rice, corn, quinoa, oats
- Unsaturated fats: extra virgin olive oil, walnuts, avocados
None of that list survived to the French rewrite. By the time the finding reached readers six months after publication, the three food categories had become three superfoods, the coronary risk finding had become a life expectancy claim, and the unhealthy half of the comparison, the refined carbs and animal fats the same study flagged as raising risk, had disappeared entirely. Kimchi, cited by an American nutritionist as a stock example of a healthy plant food, never appears.
Whose data this is
The other detail missing from the rewrite is the cohort itself. All three groups are American nurses and health professionals enrolled between 1986 and 2019, tracked mostly through self-reported food frequency questionnaires. It is a large, carefully followed population, and also a specific one: not a global sample, not tied to any national cuisine, and explicitly not a stand-in for ketogenic or other extreme diets, a limit the researchers stated themselves.
What holds up is narrower than the headline: eat whole plant foods and unsaturated fats instead of refined carbohydrates and animal fat, on whichever plan you already follow. What doesn't hold up is the idea that three ingredients, on their own, are doing the work.
Sources: American College of Cardiology · Journal of the American College of Cardiology
