Heart Healthy Recipes – Part 1

Heart healthy recipes are a good way to start improving your nutritional intake each day. Improving and balancing your diet isn’t as hard as it may appear. Start with a few changes and incorporate a few others each couple of weeks. Before you know it you’ll be eating the recommended amount of fruits, vegetables and whole grains each day.

Making these changes to your diet using heart healthy recipes will help to decrease your risk of heart attack, stroke, immune mediated diseases and will improve your cholesterol and triglyceride levels. And the best part is that when you have a great basis of flavenoids, omega 3 fatty acids, vitamins, and folate the occasional chocolate, processed foods and desserts won’t be as detrimental to the health of your heart and you won’t crave them as often.

Most of your current recipes can be made into heart healthy recipes with a few basic changes. You can begin by changing the oils you use. Instead of using vegetable oil, lard or even canola oil, the best oil to use is grapeseed oil. The difference is in the way in which the oil is processed. The grapeseed oil is cold pressed while other oils are heat-treated which changes the chemical make up of the food. Olive oil is another heart healthy oil that is not as stable at high heat as grapeseed oil. Substituting grapeseed oil or a light extra virgin olive oil will decrease the flavor to almost nothing; you won’t notice the difference in any of your cooking – but your heart will.

Resources:

MayoClinic: Heart Disease

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/heart-healthy-diet/NU00196

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Lowering Your Cholesterol with TLC

http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/public/heart/chol/chol_tlc.pdf

American Heart Association: Managing Blood Pressure with Heart Healthy Diet

http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/Conditions/HighBloodPressure/PreventionTreatmentofHighBloodPressure/Managing-Blood-Pressure-with-a-Heart-Healthy-Diet_UCM_301879_Article.jsp

University of Maryland Medical Center Heart-Healthy Diet Lifestyle Changes

http://www.umm.edu/patiented/articles/where_else_can_information_about_heart-healthy_diets_be_obtained_000043_4.htm

Women’s Health.gov: Heart Healthy Eating

http://womenshealth.gov/publications/our-publications/fact-sheet/heart-healthy-eating.cfm

Harvard Health Publications: Healthy Eating for a Healthy Heart