Eating For a Healthy Heart – 3 Tips For a Common Sense Approach
Eating for a healthy heart is an undertaking that more and more individuals are choosing on a daily basis. These days you can’t get away from it, whether it is a Bayer commercial about using aspirin for good heart health or Cheerios commercial about how the cereal can help reduce your risk of heart attack and heart disease. We are now constantly being inundated with messages about eating for a healthy heart. These messages aren’t all bad; as a matter of fact they’re very good America as a whole is now one of the most overweight countries in the world. As we all know obesity can lead to many diseases including diabetes, heart attack and heart disease. For these reasons taking a new approach to your eating habits in order to eat healthier can be a great approach to living a longer happier life. Well here are several hints to help you start eating for a healthy heart.
The first thing that we want to start doing in our quest to eat for a healthy heart is limiting unhealthy fats as well as cholesterol. Limiting the amount of saturated and trans fats that you taken can be a critical step towards lowering your cholesterol and ultimately preventing coronary artery disease. High cholesterol levels lead to build up of plaque along the walls of your arteries. As your arteries become closer and closer to being plugged sooner or later a clot can prompt a heart attack or stroke. In order to help you eat healthier the American Heart Association has provided guidelines to point consumers towards healthier eating habits.
1. These guidelines include eating less than 7% of saturated fats within your daily calorie intake.
2. Make sure that trans fats are less than 1% of your daily caloric intake.
3. Make sure that you ingest less than 300 mg per day of cholesterol for healthy adults or less than 200 mg per day if you have already been diagnosed with high levels of low density lipoprotein or bad cholesterol. Heeding these three simple concepts can help you accomplish eating for a healthy heart.
As you start eating for a healthy heart a great way to reduce saturated and trans fats is to limit the amount of solid fats that you taken to during meals. Solid fats include but are not limited to, shortening and margarine. If you are looking to add flavor when cooking try using low-fat substitute for a heart healthy diet. Examples of these substitutes include using low-fat yogurt instead of butter on a baked potato or use low sugar fruit spread on top of your toast rather than margarine. Also make sure to check food labels on crackers, chips and cookies because even though many of these snacks can be labeled reduced fat there may still be oils included which contain trans fats. Otherwise you will be working against you’re goal of eating for a healthy heart.
One red flag that indicates a food contains trans fats is if you find the phrasing “partially hydrogenated” within the ingredients list.
These are some simple things that you can start doing to start eating for a healthy heart. You’ll find that by altering your diet now and eating healthier foods that you can lengthen your life span as well as improve your quality of life as you enter your twilight years.
Everyone wants to feel better, look better and be happier. For more information on eating for a healthy heart I invite you to go to http://healthylivinginformation.net/HUK and start your plan of eating healthy today!
