Eating Healthy for your Heart

Get your heart to love you with heart friendly foods!

Did you know that your heart is one of the most important organs in the body, and the foods you eat affect how your heart works. If you want your heart to be strong and pump blood properly all through your body, it is imperative to to be eating healthy for your heart. Heart friendly foods are readily available in supermarkets, so select those that work for your own personal preferences and you should be able to help prevent heart disease in your own body.

Cholesterol is the most important thing when it comes to eating heart friendly foods. There is good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. Good cholesterol is called HDL, their job is to take excess bad cholesterol (LDL) to the liver, where it can be broken down and then leave the body. LDL cholesterol is not actually needed by your body from foods. Our bodies make enough of this cholesterol on its own. It is the LDL cholesterol that can damage our hearts, not the HDL cholesterol, which actually helps our hearts be reducing the amount of LDL cholesterol in the body. Eating healthy for your heart reduces the intake of LDL and increases the HDL which makes the whole system work better and is greatly superior to taking statins to reduce it! LDL stands for low-density lipoproteins. Because this substance has a low density, it does not flow through the blood stream as readily 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....

First, when the 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 your artery could 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 can cause a heart attack, so eating healthy for your heart really is the right thing to do.

You can also have a heart attack from LDL cholesterol build up if a piece of the build-up, called plaque, breaks off and floats down the blood stream. When it reaches a smaller part of the blood vessel, it will get stuck and block the blood, which again causes a heart attack. If the piece of plaque travels to the brain instead of the heart, it will cause a blockage in this area of the body, which in turn causes a stroke. Therefore, it is important that eating healthy for your heart reduces the foods high in cholesterol in your diet so that you can prevent heart disease and other problems in the body by using more and more heart friendly foods.