Your heart is one of the most important organs in the body, and the foods you put into your mouth effect how your heart operates. If you want your heart to be strong and function as it should for a lifetime it is important to eat a healthy diet.
Heart Healthy Foods
There are many heart healthy foods to choose from to prevent heart disease.
The American Heart Association recommends that no more than 7% of total daily calories should be from saturated fats.
And, no more than 1% of total daily calories should be from trans fats.
Salmon
Flaxseed (ground)
Oatmeal
Black or Kidney Beans
Almonds
Walnuts
Red wine
Tuna
Tofu
Brown Rice
Soy Milk
Blueberries
Carrots
Spinach
Brocolli
Sweet Potato
Red …show more content…
Our bodies make enough of this kind of cholesterol on its own.
It is the LDL cholesterol that hurts our hearts, not the HDL cholesterol, which actually helps our hearts by reducing the amount of LDL cholesterol.
Bad Cholesterol
LDL stands for low-density lipoproteins.
Because this substance has a low density, it does not flow through the blood stream as easily as it should.
The red blood cells easily release the LDL cholesterol and it sticks to the walls of your blood vessels, especially in the arteries leading to your heart.
This is bad for a number of reasons.
1. When LDL cholesterol builds up on your arteries, it reduces the amount of blood that can fit through at a time, since the artery becomes smaller. That means your heart has to pump harder and faster in order to allow the same amount of blood to flow through your body.
Over time, this makes your heart tired and not as strong. In the worst-case scenario, the blood vessel becomes so built up with LDL cholesterol that the arteries close completely. When this happens, your heart essentially panics because it is not getting the blood it needs and it starts beating rapidly to try to pump the blood.
This causes a heart