A new study has found that noshing on veggies, grains, beans and other high-fiber foods can help the heart and gut health.

According to the findings of the study published recently in the journal ‘Cardiovascular Research’, people with low-fiber diets are more likely to have narrowed arteries caused by the buildup of plaque.

Arteries are any of the muscular-walled tubes forming part of the circulation system by which blood (mainly that which has been oxygenated) is conveyed from the heart to all parts of the body.

CT scans also revealed that people’s diets influence their risk for unstable, high-risk arterial plaques that increase their risk of heart attack and stroke, researchers said.

“When we matched people’s coronary artery images with their dietary patterns, we could not only see that there is an association between dietary pattern and the presence of plaque in the coronary arteries, but also that the composition of the plaques, how dangerous they can be, is related to diet,” senior researcher Isabel Gonçalves, a professor of cardiology at Lund University in Sweden, said.