Healthiest Diet For Your Heart

If you want to know the healthiest diet for your heart, you should look around the world to see which diets are most effective in keeping human hearts healthy. There were major studies now completed that were done in close cooperation with doctors of seven countries: United States, Japan, Italy, Greece, The Netherlands, Finland and Yugoslavia.

These are countries with very different rates of heart disease. Researchers were interested in looking at who ate the vegies, who ate the fruits, who ate the beans, and who ate the fish? Turns out that people in countries who ate these foods had the lowest rate of coronery heart disease. People of countries that ate the highest amount of saturated fats had very high incidences of coronery disease. In fact, in Finland, people were fifty times more likely to have coronery heart disease than people in Crete, which is in Greece.

When you realize that fact, you can begin to see the clues in dieting that we can take advantage of. The China study also was very revealing; a book written by nutritional scientist Colin Campbell went through what the Chinese people have been eating through most of the past century. People during that time in China were generally very healthy and he found that only about 10% of their calories came from protein and only 10% from animal-based products.

He found that diseases of affluence like diabetes, cancer, and the heart became very distinct from diseases of poverty like pneumonia, intestinal obastructions, parasitic diseases and diseases arising during pregnancy. There were two very different problems that stood out; if people had problems from one of these food lists, they didn't have problems from the other food list.

Animal fat intake seemed to increase dramatically the rate of breast cancer and heart disease. Here is a real correlation that we all need to know and understand. A high carbohydrate diet was only healthy if it was made up of fruits, vegetables and whole grains that don't contain many of the refined sugars so commonly found in foods in the United States.

The caloric intake in China is thirty percent more than in the United States. Shocking? Chinese weigh twenty percent less than Americans. Why? Partly because the Chinese are more active than typical Americans. It might also be that the foods they eat (the good foods) are less inflammatory to us (better for us). The metabolic syndrome increases across all good food categories. Why? Because the 'good' foods are metabolized through the liver more cleanly, keeping it healthier. Eating 'bad' foods contaminates your liver during the metabolic process thus inhibiting its ability to do its job.

The waist size is quite important in the whole calculation of this: If your waist size is more than half you height, then it indicates that belly fat is poisoning your liver. As belly fat grows , it squeezes on the kidneys giving us high blood pressure and it blocks the ability of your muscles to listen to insulin so without the muscle chewing up sugar, and insulin not working thus giving us diabetes. That's the metabolic effects of eating bad kinds of foods. High blood sugar, high blood pressure, and high levels of bad cholesterol are all additional peripheral effects due to the contamination of the liver.

High levels of belly fat is dangerous for our health. The facts are clear and unambiguous. People who live to be very old have eaten the good foods: beans and rice for breakfast lunch and dinner, colorful antioxidant fruits and vegetables that include blueberries, strawberries, nuts of all kinds, tomatoes, mushrooms, bean sprouts, peppers, brocoli, etc.  Only you can give these foods to yourself - your doctor cannot. The healthiest diets for longevity and a healthy heart therefore, are rich in foods like the ones mentioned in this article. The best advice: limit processed carbohydrates that include white breads, white sugars, increase vitamin D levels - especially vitamin D3 - the kind that comes from sunlight. The other d vitamins are of limited benefit.