Find delicious recipes from The Oregon Guide to Heart-Healthy Living
Following are common questions about the relationship of nutrition to heart health, answered by Valerie A. Edwards, M.S., R.D., L.D., outpatient nutrition therapist and eating disorder specialist, Providence Nutrition Services
Q. Can the foods you eat improve your heart health? A. You can help prevent heart disease through diet by making good diet choices. The choices you make can have an influence on your cardiac health.
Q. What type of foods should we eat for better heart health? A. Some of the healthy foods that really improve your heart health include fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and fish. Fish has healthy fats.
People have heard this over and over again but it’s consistently true that people don’t eat nearly enough servings of fruits and vegetables. Often, they may have one fruit a day or one serving of vegetables a day, but we really need three of four servings of each. The new government guidelines actually recommend five to nine servings a day of fruits and vegetables, and most people are nowhere near that. Getting people to eat more fruits and vegetables is something that is very important for heart health.
Q. Can foods help lower cholesterol? A. One of the compounds that helps lower cholesterol is dietary fiber, which is found in fruits and vegetables, whole grains and beans or legumes. By eating more foods with fiber it’s possible to lower your cholesterol without medication. And one thing that most Americans don’t get enough of besides fruits and vegetables is dietary fiber, so trying to find more sources of that is a good way to lower cholesterol.
Q. What exactly do you mean by whole grains? A. It can be difficult to figure out what grains are whole grains. When you hear the term whole grains, we are mostly referring to breads and cereals, whole wheat pasta or brown rice. The last two are lesser sources of fiber but every little bit helps. Most people can get the biggest boost in dietary fiber by eating whole grain breads and cereals.
Q. How do I know a food has a lot of dietary fiber and how much is recommended? A. A lot of foods are promoted as being high in fiber but you really have to look closely at the label. For breads and cereals, you want to look for a minimum of two grams of fiber per serving but often you can find five or more grams of fiber in a grain product and then you know that you are getting a good whole grain product. One thing that gets left out quite a bit in terms of fiber is beans. Lentils, black beans, pinto beans – those all have about five grams of fiber per serving, which is really great. So trying to get more beans by putting them on salads, eating bean soups – that is a very helpful way to boost your fiber intake.
One of the benefits of the low-carb diets is that more whole grain products have been coming out on the market because they subtract the fiber out of the carbs to get the net carb count. So there are actually a lot of new whole-grain products out there, like high-fiber tortillas.
Q. What are the worst foods for your heart? A. If I had to pick a category, the worst foods for your heart would be snack foods. Most people have heard of trans-fat or hydrogenated fat. These are fats that are put into products that sit on the grocery shelf. It extends the shelf life of things like muffins, cookies, microwave popcorn, a lot of crackers and chips – all those things tend to have a lot of trans-fats. Many people eat a lot of trans-fats and that usually tends to increase cholesterol and is not good for the heart. But we are starting to see more labels that say ‘no trans-fats’, because the food manufacturers are trying to use other healthy fat, which is a good thing.
Q. What do you recommend for heart-healthy snacks?
A. The best heart-healthy snacks include low-fat dairy products like low-fat yogurt or cottage cheese and combining those with fruit – that’s one way to get a good snack in. Nuts are actually a very healthy snack, if you like raw or dry-roasted nuts, but the important thing is not to go overboard with handfuls, because there can be a lot of calories. A quarter to a third of a cup of nuts is a good snack, or combining nuts and fruit is a good combination. Using natural peanut butter, having like half a peanut butter sandwich or peanut butter with some fruit is another good snack to have that is satisfying.
Q. What do you think about indulging sometimes? A. It’s fine to indulge sometimes but it’s the frequency you need to look out for. In December, for example, most people are indulging a couple times a week or more, and that really gets out of balance. If you are going out once a week or twice a month and going a little overboard, if you balance that out with exercise, it’s OK to do that. We have to keep life fun, so if you know that you are going to be indulging more in a particular week, if you increase your exercise that week, you can balance it out and make it work.
Q. How long should you commit to changing what you eat? A. I think that we need to look at it as a lifestyle change, rather than a temporary diet, because people tend to do diets for a short period of time, usually three-months, six-months or maybe even a year. But when you are looking at heart health, you need to be looking at how you are going to eat for the rest of your life.
