Heart Healthy Diet Tips - iVillage Your Total Health

Diet Advice to take to Heart

It seems to be a universal truth that following a diet in order to fit into your skinny jeans is infinitely more motivating than getting psyched for a diet that promotes heart health. Who ever sighs and says, "I wish I had Cameron Diaz's cardiovascular system"? But the great news about eating a heart-healthy diet is that along with reducing your risk of heart disease (the leading cause of death for women), you have the potential to lose weight as well. "For people who are making poor choices in their diet," nutritionist Amy Hendel says, "if all they did was flip their diet to healthier choices, they would see benefits and weight loss, and they wouldn't even need to get into portion control until they were well into their journey." Here's how to make the flip.

1. Cut down on eating foods from a box. Go for whole, natural foods, before they become processed and boxed, by doing most of your shopping in the periphery of the grocery store. Instead of buying boxed foods, go for fruits and vegetables; whole grains in their high-fiber state, before they get processed into white bread; whole grain, high-fiber cereals like bran cereals; and lean cuts of meat without the skin.

2. Eat the right kinds of fat — monounsaturated and polyunsaturated. Many women shun fat, thinking they'll lose weight more easily, but the right kind of fat actually has several benefits. It's good for your heart and your waistline, as well as for satiating you at mealtime. You'll find monounsaturated fats in olive, sesame, sunflower and canola oil, plus nuts and avocados. Cook with these oils and sprinkle nuts into your yogurt to get their health benefits, but remember that they are still highly caloric and a little goes a long way. One gram of any kind of oil has nine calories. Polyunsaturated fats are found in fish. Healthy choices include salmon, sardines and tilapia for their omega-3 fatty acids and low mercury count.

3. Avoid the two bad fats — saturated fat and trans fat. Saturated fats are found in anything derived from an animal. Meats and cheeses are the main sources of saturated fat. Trans fats are created in a lab when molecules are rearranged to become fat that is added for taste and preservation in processed foods. Trans fats can even lurk in foods labeled "0 trans fats." Hendel says, "Companies are legally allowed to say '0 trans fats' in the mathematical breakdown on the label, but if you go down to the ingredients, you can find trans fat there. If you eat 10 servings of these half-a-gram-of-trans-fat foods in one day, you could be unknowingly consuming five grams of trans fats. Multiply that by a week and a month, and you've got a lot of artery-clogging fat in your diet that's insidiously found its way there."

4. Don't skimp on dairy. "There is so much mythology out there on dairy products," Hendel says, "but there are many studies that show people who consume several portions of fat-free dairy products per day are at a lower risk for hypertension or heart disease and are more able to shed pounds."

5. Cut your sodium intake to two grams (2,000 milligrams) per day. Read food labels to find the sodium content. A regular can of soup might have 900 to 1,000 milligrams, which would be half of your sodium for the day. "Many years ago," Hendel says, "hospitalized patients were put on a diet with two grams of sodium per day to get them healthy enough to leave the hospital. Now all the cardiac health care professionals recommend two grams a day or less to the general public, which means we've all been consuming too much sodium." To cut back on your sodium intake, try using fresh herbs rather than salt to season your food.

6. Bone up on antioxidants. Not only can antioxidants fight cancer, but they're also good for your heart. Antioxidants subdue heart-disease-causing free radicals. "You want a variety of colors — red apples, yellow grapefruit and squashes, orange tomatoes, green peppers — to get all the benefits of the antioxidants," Hendel says.

7. Educate yourself on heart-healthy foods, and save money at the same time. "A supermarket like Whole Foods prides itself on the fact that anything you find on its shelves will have absolutely no trans fat," Hendel says. Go to a Whole Foods store or to another market that follows heart-healthy guidelines, and take note of what food products are featured. After you've figured out what's healthy, go to a cheaper market to buy those foods. "It takes one hour of perusal and writing some notes," Hendel says, "like: 'These are the seven meal replacement or snack bars I can buy, these are the 20 cereals I can buy.'"