If you follow a cardiac diet, exercise regularly and don’t smoke, you’ll enormously improve your odds in avoiding a coronary, even with a family history of heart disease. In fact, a recently developed method of monitoring the body’s major arteries has shown that with the right diet and exercise the development of atherosclerosis is slowed – even sometimes reversed.
But before we go any further, let’s define our terms:
Heart attack occurs when a blood clot, or thrombus, blocks a coronary artery, stopping the blood flow to the heart and killing that area of the heart muscle.
Cardiovascular diseases affect both the heart and the blood vessels. They include:
Hyperlipidemias are high levels of fats (lipids) in the blood. These include:
It’s safe to say that if you follow a diet that takes these risk factors into consideration, if you exercise regularly, shed extra weight and don’t smoke cigarettes, you’ll enormously improve your odds in avoiding or postponing a coronary – even if you have a family history of heart disease.
Keep the following rules in mind when you buy heart-healthy foods and cardiac diet menus, and as far as possible when you eat out. Thus you’ll be providing a healthy and moderate way of eating for the whole family, not just for high-risk adolescent boys, adult men, and postmenopausal women.
Despite what you may have heard, there is no level of blood cholesterol below which you are “safe” and above which you are in trouble.
For diagnostic purposes, physicians often consider a cholesterol level below 250 milligrams per decilitre (100 millilitres) of blood to be normal. However, the chance of a heart attack triples when a person’s blood cholesterol rises from 150 to 250 milligrams, and beyond that point the risk increases at a faster pace. So although 250 milligrams may be “normal” for most adults, as far as cholesterol is concerned, the lower the better.
It has been found that in the United States the average person takes in about 600 milligrams of cholesterol each day. However, anyone with a family history of heart disease and high blood cholesterol, boys over the age of 14 (when cholesterol levels first begin to rise), adult men and postmenopausal women should not consume more than 300 milligrams.
Cholesterol is found only in animal foods, and the most common sources are large amounts of egg yolks and liver. People at risk should not eat more than two or three eggs a week including those used in cooking, and liver and other organ meats should be reserved for occasional treats.
Because shellfish are low in fat and contain polyunsaturated fat as well as cholesterol, they may be eaten more frequently, but still not regularly.
A word on eggs. They are one of our most inexpensive sources of high-quality protein, and they contain a number of vitamins and minerals. So younger boys, girls and premenopausal women, if their cholesterol levels are low, may (and should) eat them freely. Similarly, liver is especially high in vitamin A and iron and should be eaten regularly.
Fortunately, we can lower blood cholesterol through a cardiac diet. The first step is to control fat intake.
Between 40 and 45 percent of the calories most of us eat come from fats – visible fats and those hidden in foods – although ideally, fat calories should not exceed 30 percent. Gram for gram, fat has more than twice as many calories as carbohydrate and protein.
Although the three types of fat we consume (saturated, polyunsaturated, monounsaturated) yield the same number of calories per gram, they have very different effects on the body. Saturated fat (primarily animal fat) accelerates the development of atherosclerosis; less than one-third of your dietary fat, then, should be saturated.
On the other hand, the polyunsaturated fat contained in many vegetable oils lowers blood cholesterol, retarding the development of atherosclerotic plaques. For this reason, more than one-third of your fat intake should be polyunsaturated.
And the remaining third should be monounsaturated fat, which seems to have little effect one way or the other. Practically, all this means you should:
Whatever the root cause of overweight, it is the result of too many calories from energy foods and too little activity. Although mild obesity with no other complications is not a major risk factor in heart disease, pronounced obesity – 13kg (30 lb) or more overweight – does put an added strain on the cardiovascular system.
And if extra weight is accompanied by high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol, diabetes or cigarette smoking the risk is even greater. (In turn, obesity may promote high blood cholesterol, hypertension or diabetes in individuals who have an inherited tendency to these conditions.)
By cutting down the total fat in your diet, you replace fat calories with energy from protein or carbohydrate (at, of course, a much lower rate). So use fish and poultry, and instead of serving meat main dishes, consider substituting entrees made with dried beans and peas or whole grains (all sources of good protein) several times a week.
Most people gain weight not by one grand binge of overeating, but by accumulating a few unused calories each day. Therefore, plan menus to get the most nutrients for every calorie. Keep high-energy junk foods out of the house.
Don’t insist that your children clean their plates when they are no longer hungry (you’re only training them to overeat), and don’t use food, particularly sweets, as a reward for good behaviour.
But weight reduction alone, however drastic, is not a sufficient anti-coronary measure. Being thin doesn’t mean you have done everything possible to ward off heart disease. If you control your weight through a high meat or egg diet you may be doing yourself more harm than good.
Lowering your cholesterol is generally far more important than simply losing weight.
You’ll get a big boost in your fight against excess weight (and tooth decay) if you eliminate sugar’s empty calories. There is also evidence, although it is not conclusive, that a high intake of sugar may influence the development of diabetes in people with a genetic susceptibility to the disease. And finally, some studies have shown that a high sugar intake raises the level of a type of blood fat called triglycerides. And hypertriglyceridemia (an excessively high triglyceride level) is, like hypercholesterolemia, a risk factor in heart attacks.
Use sugar as little as possible in cooking and at the table, and avoid processed foods that have sugar high on their ingredients list (when it gives the food’s contents in descending order by weight). Substitute fresh or water-packed fruits for sweet desserts: snack on raw vegetables and wholegrain (low-fat, low-salt) biscuits.
You can diminish the risk of developing heart disease if you follow four very specific cardiac dietary maxims and also exercise regularly.
