Teresa T. Fung of Simmons College in Boston and colleagues studied female nurses age 34 to 59 in the Nurses' Health Study/ The women did not have cardiovascular disease or diabetes when the study began in 1980.

Researchers wanted to see how closely the women followed Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, known as the DASH diet.

Researchers calculated a DASH score that increased when the women ate more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts and legumes, and stayed close to the recommended amounts of low-fat dairy. Scores decreased with increased consumption of red and processed meats, sweetened beverages and sodium.

During 24 years of follow-up, 2,129 women had a non-fatal heart attack, 976 died of coronary heart disease and 2,317 had strokes.

The study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, found the one-fifth of women who had diets that were most similar to the DASH diet were 24 percent less likely to develop fatal or non-fatal coronary heart disease and 18 percent less likely to have a stroke than the one-fifth of women with the lowest DASH scores.