Nutrition: What We Eat plays A Major Role In The Development Of Heart Disease

Proper Nutrition Is Essential For Our Health

High cholesterol, high blood pressure, over weight, and diabetes, among the other risk factors for heart disease are directly related to the foods that we eat.

Categories And Types of Fat

The Natural Fats:

Saturated Fats:

Saturated fats are fats that are solid at room temperature. Mostly they are byproducts of foods that come from animals, such as meat, milk, and milk products. There are other sources too, such as tropical oils, coconut, palm kernel oil, and cocoa butter.

When we eat saturated fat our bodies produce LDL low density lipoproteins, which are the fats associated with building the plaque in our arteries.

Monounsaturated Fats

Monounsaturated fats are fats that are liquid at room temperature; they include olive oil and peanut oil.

These fats are associated with cleaning our arteries from the buildup of the plaque.

These oils are the healthy ones, especially olive oil, which is common in the Mediterranean diet and has been proven to have positive effects on our health.

Polyunsaturated Fats

Polyunsaturated fats are fats that are also liquid at room temperature, such as canola oil, safflower oil, corn oil, and other vegetable oils and fish oil.

There are two categories of polyunsaturated oils.

• Omega 3 fatty acids
• Omega 6 fatty acids

Omega 3 and omega 6 oils are essential, we need them for our existence, our bodies don't make them naturally we must get them from our diets.

The Unnatural Fat:

Trans Fat

Trans fat, trans fatty acids are polyunsaturated oils that go through a process of hydrogenation that convert the oils into saturated oils, and they too turn into solids at room temperature. These oils are the killers; they increase the amounts of HDL cholesterol in our blood, and they clog up the arteries causing atherosclerosis and heart disease.

Cholesterol

Cholesterol which is a waxy chemical produced by our bodies, and is also found in all animal foods, such as meat poultry fish eggs and dairy product.

Eating too much cholesterol increases the amount of saturated fat which increasing our LDL cholesterol particles, is also a major cause of heart disease

Proper nutrition is extremely important in avoiding heart disease

We can begin to read the nutrition food labels and get the nutrtion facts. We can read the details of the ingredients that are in the products that we eat.

By doing so we can learn about the products that are killing us, causing heart disease and heart attacks, and eliminate them from our diets.

By eliminating those foods and replacing them with healthy ones we are taking the proper steps towards avoiding heart disease and living a heart healthy lifestyle.

Watching our nutrition will make us feel healthier, and we will know that we have done all we can do to reduce our risks for heart disease.