What is a Good Heart Healthy Diet?
Making sure your heart is healthy may add years to your life. The importance of the healthy heart diet is to give up certain types of foods that may cause heart complications. People who are interested should be willing to give up greasy and fattening foods. To some this may mean that you must be willing to give up the foods that taste really good.
Recent studies have suggested that eating a heart-healthy diet can cut the risk of developing heart disease or stroke by 80%. Considering that heart disease is still the number one killer of both men and women in the United States, this is news worth considering!
Weight control and exercise are the primary steps to a healthy heart, but there are additional ways to boost the body’s immunity to heart disease. Take a closer look at how specific food choices impact our capacity to help manage or prevent heart disease and high blood pressure— two of the biggest health challenges we face today.
1. Limit your intake of saturated fats – Replace red meat with beans, nuts, poultry, and fish whenever possible, and switch from whole milk and other full-fat dairy foods to lower fat versions.
2. Use liquid vegetable oils rich in (polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats) in place of butter in cooking and at the table.
3. Aim to eat one or more good sources of omega-3 fats daily—fish, walnuts, canola or soybean oil, ground flax seeds or flaxseed oil.
In order to have a healthy heart, you need to minimize the amount of cholesterol in your body. Cholesterol comes from the foods you eat and from your body itself. However, your body alone creates the appropriate amount of cholesterol for you, so it doesn’t need any additional cholesterol from your food intake. In order to reduce the amount of cholesterol in your diet, you should limit the amount of red meat that you eat. Instead of red meat, you can eat fish and poultry. Use egg whites or substitutes instead of the whole egg. As a rule of thumb, if it’s greasy, you probably shouldn’t eat it.
Being successful at this diet can prevent a heart attack and a stroke. All in all, it should lead to a more healthy existence and give you more energy.
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