Surprising New Heart Healthy Diet Recommendations

The beautiful – and vexing - thing about science and medicine, is that we’re always making new discoveries. And with each new discovery, our understanding of health changes. For years we’ve been told to ditch saturated fats and replace them with healthy vegetable oils. It spawned a big shift in how people ate. “Heart healthy” vegetable oils became all the rage. But all this has changed with a bombshell of a study published in the British Medical Journal February, 2013 . . . The study found that while substituting vegetable oils for saturated animal fats may help lower cholesterol, it dramatically increases your risk of heart disease!rnThe study analyzed a batch of newly recovered data from the Sydney Diet Heart Study that ran from 1966-1973. They looked at a group of 458 men ages 30-59 who had been instructed to substitute safflower oil for saturated fat intake. The study found that the men who made this switch had an increased risk of not only heart disease but of death from all causes.[1] How could this be? These Oils Are No Longer Considered So Heart Healthy As more and more doctors are realizing, saturated fat and cholesterol intake are not the major villains they’ve been made out to be when it comes to heart disease. No, the major threat to your heart is inflammation. And these grain-sourced oils cause much of this inflammation in your body. See, grains and grain oils have a particular kind of fatty acid in them known as omega-6 fatty acids. Ordinarily these fats are healthy for you. However, these fats need to be balanced out in your body with an adequate amount of omega-3 fatty acids. If these two fats are not in balance, your body is at risk for developing systemic inflammation. Over generations, we have increased our intake of grains – breads, pasta and now vegetable oils. This has led to an imbalanced amount of these omega-6 fatty acids and consequently more inflammation. The typical American diet contains 14-25 times more omega-6 fatty acids than omega-3 fatty acids.[2] So in addition to cutting out these vegetable oils high in omega-6 fatty acids, one of the best things you can do to help your heart is to cut back on grains in general. By reducing grains in your diet - particularly refined grains - you can significantly reduce the amount of inflammation in your body. And less inflammation means a decreased risk for heart disease. The Most Important Heart Healthy Diet Advice While the results of this study means we have to rethink how we eat, one thing has NOT changed when it comes to protecting yourself against heart disease . . . You can dramatically lower your risk of heart disease with strategic lifestyle choices. rnI’ve helped hundreds of people use nutrition to fight off heart disease. Simply by making smart choices each day, you can do more for your heart than any doctor or drug. Diet, exercise and stress reduction is the best heart health medicine I know of. Want to protect your heart? Make the decision to live a heart healthy lifestyle. Sources: [1] C. E. Ramsden, D. Zamora, B. Leelarthaepin, S. F. Majchrzak-Hong, K. R. Faurot, C. M. Suchindran, A. Ringel, J. M. Davis, J. R. Hibbeln. Use of dietary linoleic acid for secondary prevention of coronary heart disease and death: evaluation of recovered data from the Sydney Diet Heart Study and updated meta-analysis. BMJ, 2013; 346 (feb04 3) [2] Omega-6 Fatty Acids. University of Maryland Medical School website.