When you hear “heart disease prevention” you likely think about cholesterol, being a healthy weight, and medication like statins. Many people find it confusing, with so many restrictions and new stories in the news about the latest discovery that’s been supposedly linked to heart disease.
The truth is simpler than we’ve been led to believe, and improving heart health isn’t complicated.
If heart disease prevention is important to you, I can tell you that your number one priority should be analyzing what you eat. The food pyramid has failed us, resulting in millions of Americans who believe they’re eating the right foods but are actually putting them on the fast track to my operating table.
Modern dietary advice tells us to avoid butter and eat vegetable oil. To avoid eggs and eat cereal.
This is not going to increase heart health!
We are surrounded by foods that lack nutritional density. This means we remain hungry after eating, and quickly over-consume. Before we know it, our pants don’t fit and the scales are no longer our friend.
These are what Brian Keith calls “NFOs” – or near food objects. Food created in factories by corporations is cheap and enjoyable, but by no means healthy – even if they do try to pretend otherwise by adding “fortified with extra vitamins” and “proven to reduce cholesterol.”
My approach to food is simple and easy to remember: humans are supposed to eat things that grow in the ground, or which eat what grows in the ground. That means meat, eggs, vegetables, and so on. It doesn’t include Oreos, cheese in a can, and microwave meals.
Picking the right foods requires discipline when we’re surrounded by colorful boxes of NFOs, so here are some simple rules for improving heart health.
Curate your sources
Everywhere you turn, there’s a semi-naked model selling a product. Often, these products are supplements with bold claims about packing on muscle and melting away fat.
They belong in the trash.
Improving heart health is about eating foods that actively contribute to our overall health, not looking for a powdered shortcut. But I’ll admit, the marketing is good. We see men and women with chiseled abs, a shapely figure, and moving heavy weights in a gym and our mind tells us they’re healthy.
“I’d love to look like that! If I drink that muscle-building, fat-melting supplement, I’ll also develop buns of steel.”
There are two problems with this thinking:
- Their physical attributes came from years of consistent training, and no supplement can ever replace that.
- A physique is no indicator of health.
It’s possible to eat badly but still be strong and lean. I see many people get led astray because they take bad advice from people who look great but share bad advice.
This also applies to people who perform impressive feats. We assume that because someone can run a triathlon they must be healthy. The realty is that when people push their body to limits they often consume unhealthy foods to get extra calories or fast energy.
Let’s take Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps as an example. He ate 12,000 calories a day – around six times more than the average adult needs to consume. His breakfast consisted of sugar-coated French toast, chocolate chip pancakes, and fried egg sandwiches with fried onions. Lunch included white bread and energy drinks. He’d also eat an entire pizza and 2 pounds of pasta!
His intense exercise schedule meant that he required extra energy and the 12,000 calories didn’t make him fat, but pizza and energy drinks are still not health foods. As former Mr Olympia bodybuilder Jay Cutler has said, if he doesn’t eat processed foods and sugars he can’t eat enough to maintain his massive frame.
So step one is to identify your goal. If it’s heart disease prevention and improving health, don’t look at advanced athletes for dietary nutrition.
Avoid processed foods
This is sadly very difficult in our society. It’s easy once you know what you’re looking for but there can be a lot of misconceptions around what processed foods are.
Most people identify the obvious culprits – cookies, cakes, microwave meals. Eliminating those from your diet will certainly help with improving heart health.
Where people are often caught out is the staggering amount of food products that contain added sugar or vegetable oils. The cereal and granola that you buy as a healthy breakfast option are no exception to this. My advice is next time you’re in the supermarket for your groceries, look at the labels on the foods you usually buy – you might be surprised at what’s in them.
Oils and fats are a particular problem. The healthy options are extra virgin olive oil, coconut oil, butter, lard, and tallow. Lower prices mean that other oils are used in processed foods instead, such as canola, sunflower, and other vegetable oils. Sadly, this is also true in many restaurants, so a healthy item from the menu can be cooked in oils that we should avoid. This isn’t anything to worry about if you only occasionally eat at restaurants, but it can quickly add up if you frequently eat away from home.
Avoiding the following foods will put you ahead of the majority of people, and help you increase heart health:
- Sugar
- Processed foods – if it’s in a box or bag, check the ingredients
- Oils such as sunflower, canola, vegetable etc
- Cereal
If you find it easier to know what you can eat instead of what you shouldn’t, my guidelines are to stick with animal products – meat, organs, eggs, butter – along with foods that grow in nature e.g. fruit, vegetables, nuts, and seeds.
Carbohydrates are not the enemy if you eat whole, unprocessed foods. A significant problem with carbs is that we often view them as a single food type, but there’s a huge difference between a sweet potato and ice cream.
There’s a lot of flexibility with what you can eat, and you should be guided by what works for you. If you prefer a plant-based diet, continue with it – just be mindful that many foods sold as vegan are incredibly processed, so it takes some effort to meet your calorie and nutrient needs in a healthy way. Similarly, if you enjoy animal products there’s no need to force yourself to follow a plant-based diet.
Home cooking
The simplest way to know what you’re eating is to make it yourself. Improving heart health begins with knowing what’s best to eat, and that’s information I’m sharing around my site. Armed with this information, you can buy, cook, and eat the healthiest foods for heart disease prevention, and avoid the foods that are damaging your health and expanding your waistline.
While an occasional visit to a restaurant won’t hurt you, the likelihood is they’re using ingredients that you shouldn’t be eating on a regular basis. That makes it difficult or impossible to become metabolically healthy while your food is cooked by someone else.
That’s why I suggest home cooking as much as possible – that way, your heart health is in your hands.
If you’re serious about improving your heart health, sign up for my newsletter here and receive more tips on heart disease prevention and receive my free metabolic health assessment.
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