Foods that protect your heart….

Today's Post, Tuesday, 5-26-2009

I got an email with the theme of foods that will reduce your cholesterol level.

But reducing total cholesterol is not sufficient to protect your heart.

You have to lower LDL cholesterol and triglycerides while INCREASING your HDL cholesterol. And you also need to prevent both kinds of cholesterol from oxidizing.

So you need to do way more than just lowering your total cholesterol.

But the email I got also noted some very key points about the foods they included. Their food list itself was great. Many of the foods they included do protect your heart because they do one or more or even several of the things on the list of things above that WILL protect your heart.

So, I’ve used their list and upgraded it a bit here.

1. Eat green and nonstarchy vegetables every day. Eat some of them raw and uncooked. Two a day is a minimum. But five servings a day is better. Here’s why that protects your heart. Many vegetables contain sterols and many contain soluble fiber. Both sterols and soluble fiber lower LDL cholesterol or prevent it from getting too high in the first place. And such vegetables are a great source of both.

But there’s even more protection from eating green and nonstarchy vegetables every day:

They contain several kinds of antioxidants in combinations that sharply reduce oxidation of your LDL and HDL and protect your heart that way.

Eating green and nonstarchy vegetables every day also has very few calories and fills you up. So when you eat them every day, you eat LESS of more fattening foods since you are much less hungry for them. So you’ll be less fat, be less likely to get type 2 diabetes, and much less likely to get high blood pressure. And every one of those effects protects your heart.

2. Eat two or three pieces or servings of whole fruit each day. Almost all kinds of fruit contain the antioxidant vitamin C plus many kinds of antioxidants in combinations that sharply reduce oxidation of your LDL and HDL and protect your heart that way.

Whole apples and dark berries are particularly good for your heat.

Apples are both high in soluble fiber that lowers your LDL and eating whole apples helps with fatloss or prevents you from becoming fat just like eating green and nonstarchy vegetables. Adding even one apple a day has been shown to help people lose fat weight.

And eating dark berries is astoundingly heart protective because they are very high to extremely high in antioxidants; they have been found to increase your protective HDL; & they also lower HDL. In addition, berries contain micronutrients that work with vitamin C to keep your arteries inside surfaces, endothelium, intact, smooth, and resilient. And those effects directly prevent heart disease and help prevent high blood pressure.

Plus berries give you a sweet taste WITHOUT giving you type 2 diabetes from blood sugar spikes, increased bodyfat, & increased triglycerides.

Eating sugar for a sweet taste does all those bad things TO you if you eat it too often. And high fructose corn syrup is at least that bad for your heart. Plus at least 30 % of it in food and drinks still has mercury in it as far is known as of today’s date. (See our post from Friday last week for details.)

So, if you eat berries instead of sugar or high fructose corn syrup for your sweet tooth, you protect your heart double!

3. If you can possibly manage it, eat beans or lentils or both several times a week. They are high in soluble fiber. So they lower LDL cholesterol

They provide protein without any bad fats. They are inexpensive and are convenient to eat each day once you cook up a batch with a week’s servings. And, even though beans can be a bit higher on glycemic index, other than lentils which are low, beans and lentils are so high in fiber, they also help keep off excess fat just like apples and green vegetables.

4. Eat raw and dry roasted nuts. (Note that oil roasted & salted nuts are bad for you though!)

Nuts contain sterols and fiber that lower your LDL cholesterol. The oils they contain are monosaturated oils just like olive oil that does the heart protective double of increasing your protective HDL while lowering your LDL cholesterol. Walnuts also have a mix including an omega 3 oil that has been directly shown to be heart protective. Nuts taste really good without the triglyceride boost you get from sweet or refined grain snacks. So nuts are a great substitute for junk food snacks.

Nuts contain many minerals that support your health and which help prevent high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes.

Plus, like green vegetables and apples, nuts are so filling, they tend to prevent you from eating more fattening foods. This effect is so strong in fact that people who add nuts to their daily foods either gain no weight or lose it. Given the high fat and oil content of nuts, this is NOT what most people expect.

In fact, nuts are so good for you if you aren’t allergic to them, people who eat nuts most days outlive people who don’t by as much as five years!

5. Discontinue eating refined grain foods or foods made from refined grains totally to the best of your ability. If you eat a grain food, eat whole grain foods only at least 98% of the time. Refined grain foods increase your triglycerides, spike your blood sugar, and are known to help cause type 2 diabetes and obesity all of which harm your heart.

Eating some whole grain foods is OK due to the much greater natural nutrition and the fiber in whole grains.

Lastly, perhaps the most heart healthy of the whole grains are oats. Oatmeal made from rolled or steel cut oats – NOT the instant cooking kind that is refined enough to not be a whole grain – has so much soluble fiber, people who eat that kind of oatmeal often not only have lower LDL cholesterol, they have fewer heart attacks.

So if you eat “Old Fashioned” oatmeal and some whole grain foods and stop eating all foods made with refined grains, you protect your heart twice!

6. Eat wild caught fish or pasture raised chickens or beef fed only grass as protein foods or extract as close to all the fat from grain feed meat as you can manage.

Wild caught fish contain omega 3 oils that lower your triglyceride levels and your level of CRP inflammation and protect your heart directly. So does taking omega 3 supplements made from algae or from purified fish oil.

Pasture raised chickens or beef fed only grass have some omega 3 oils also.

But of perhaps most importance, they have very little bioconcentrated pesticides, herbicides, other pollutant chemicals, and very little omega 6 oils that increase CRP inflammation and saturated fat that increases LDL cholesterol.

Grain fed meat animals, chickens, and farmed fish tend to have the reverse qualities and cause heart disease. At this time, farmed fish are too high in pollutants to consider at all. But with grain fed poultry and beef, you can minimize their bad effects by choosing lean cuts, removing all visible fat and skin, and cooking in a way that removes still more of their fat.

Grilling at moderate temperatures in way that allows all the grease to drip away from the meat you eat or cooking in water, refrigerating afterwards and the skimming the fat and saturated fat glop that forms on the top of the water both work.

Another way to get animal protein that has a good health track record is to eat and drink nonfat and very lowfat dairy products – or get your dairy products from cattle fed only grass. The same principles apply.

7. Eat health and heart OK oils in these two ways besides eating raw and dry roasted nuts.

Avocados (& therefore guacamole) and extra virgin olive oil are so heart protective it’s astounding.

Eating them protects your heart multiple ways. They increase your protective HDL cholesterol; they lower your LDL cholesterol, and they have antioxidants that prevent both your HDL and LDL cholesterol from oxidizing.

Avocados have even been shown to lower triglycerides directly. And by using them only, you avoid all the oils and fats that boost LDL cholesterol from saturated fat or boost inflammation from excessive omega 6 oils. (Plus you avoid using hydrogenated oils with trans fats, or transfats, that do ALL the reverse things that damage your heart. Those oils lower HDL cholesterol, increase triglycerides, and increase LDL cholesterol. Those effects make hydrogenated oils with trans fats a heart attack starter!)

So by getting your essential fatty acids from nuts, avocados, extra virgin olive oil, and wild caught fish and some naturally fed animals instead of from heart damaging fats and oils, you again protect your heart twice! You give it food that makes it healthy. And you stop eating foods that make it sick.