Delicious Heart Healthy Recipes For Enjoyment And Health Benefits

Why Heart Healthy Recipes?

Your last doctor's visit revealed you have high blood pressure, high blood fats, and high cholesterol and your doctor sent you home with a list of foods to eat and others to avoid.

The doctor has told you to cook heart healthy recipes and adopt a low fat diet, eat healthful proteins, carbohydrates and fats and avoid junk foods. You take a look at the list and your heart sinks (no pun intended). You see many favorite foods that you can't have now like French fries and coke.

Many of those you can have you rarely eat and have no idea how to prepare and make tasty, like greens and other vegetables. You know you need to make these changes in your diet, the doctor has told you that your health depends on it, but where do you start to find heart healthy recipes?

Factors Dangerous to Heart Health

First, let me explain how, sugar, and lack of fiber and vitamin C in the diet, contribute to heart disease.

We've been led to believe that we need to avoid fat and cholesterol in our diets when really the sweet stuff does the damage.

Here is how. Heart disease rises with high cholesterol levels in the blood especially high blood fats, and the type of cholesterol that is bound to low density lipoproteins or LDL.

But heart disease decreases with high levels of high density lipoprotein or HDL.

This is because on the one hand, HDL binds excess cholesterol in the bloodstream and escorts it to the gall bladder where the gall bladder deals with it and removes it from the body.

On the other hand LDL carries cholesterol through the bloodstream where it can attach itself to blood vessels walls forming plaques that can block the blood vessels. This is why we call LDL "bad" cholesterol and HDL "good" cholesterol.

Now traditional societies who rely almost totally on meat and dairy or on fatty fish for their food intake, such as the Masai of East Africa or the Inuit of Greenland have known almost no heart disease despite high levels of fat in their diet, that is until they adopt a western style diet, which is high in sugar.

Researchers have found that when sugar breaks down in the gut one of the by-products forms acetates that result in cholesterol formation in the body, and in this way sugar contributes to elevated cholesterol levels in the blood.

Eating the Heart Healthy Way

Researchers have also found that increased intake of vitamin C decreases blood fats, total cholesterol, and LDL, and increases HDL.

So firstly increase your vitamin C intake and add more fiber to your diet as this speeds up the elimination of wastes in the bowel, which decreases the re-absorption of bile acids and their conversion into cholesterol.

See below our heart friendly food index for vitamin C rich and fiber rich foods (coming soon).

Second, before you conjure up images of eating tasteless and unsatisfying rabbit food for the rest of your life, take heart. You have a whole new universe of mouth watering dining in store. Just embrace the learning ahead of you, and look at the changes in your eating plan like an exciting adventure. Heart healthy recipes can be very tasty!

Third, start gradually, making one change at a time. Listen to your body and keep an eating journal for a few weeks at least, to record your progress. This will help keep you on track and motivate you to keep going. You could begin by making your favorite take out food at home.

Instead of going to the drive thru at McDonalds to pick up dinner check out the fresh produce, meat, and bakery sections of your supermarket and pick up some lean ground beef, fresh crisp lettuce, ripe juicy tomatoes, potatoes, garlic, freshly baked wholegrain buns, tasty good quality sauces and spreads, low fat sour cream, and you are good to go to create a home made mouth watering burger, with jacket potato or wedges. Yum!

If you love fish 'n' chips, same thing - buy the freshest fish you can find. Batter it with whole grain flours, low fat milk or substitute, add a free range egg and spices and grill with your potato wedges. Add a green salad with a good quality tasty dressing and voila you've got a meal to add to your heart healthy recipes with all the flavor of your traditional fish 'n' chips, but without the junk fats your body has difficulty processing.

When you feel more adventurous you could try especially heart friendly fatty fish varieties like fresh salmon, grilled, baked or poached plain with a wedge of lemon or make more elaborate creations. See our heart healthy recipes (coming soon).

Experiment with Different Cooking Styles.

For your heart healthy recipes - grill, poach, bake and steam your food rather than frying or roasting it.

Buy the freshest foods you can find. Store most vegetables and some fruits in the fridge and the rest in dry, cool, dark, well aerated cupboards.

Cover, cool and store any chopped vegetables and fruit you don't plan to cook immediately away from the light. Light and air destroy many nutrients including vitamin C and the whole purpose of cooking heart healthy recipes is to eat as many nutrient rich foods as you can.

The Benefits of Healthy Foods

You've probably heard of antioxidants and how they mop up free radicals that damage your heart and blood vessels. The lycopene in watermelon and tomatoes really benefits heart health. In the case of tomatoes you can eat them raw, but for best benefits cook them or use tomato pure and tomato paste in sauces with olive oil, onions and garlic such as in bolognaise sauces.

Green and colorful fruit and vegetables are packed with other antioxidants, so get a variety of these and eat them fresh and mostly raw everyday or juice them. Fruit and vegetable salads are an easy way of doing this.

They say dressings make a salad and you will discover many tasty heart healthy recipes for salads and dressings.

You need to include good dressings with your salads not only for their taste, but also for their health value. What makes a tasty dressing anyway?

Well usually it's the oil or the fat in it. How do you make tasty dressings heart healthy? By using heart healthy fats, like avocado, olives, walnuts, almonds, flaxseed and their oils. Cold pressed oils are best because their nutrients haven't been destroyed by heat or chemical processing.

Herbs add great taste to dressings and other foods. Garlic for example, packs a great flavor punch, but not only that, it lowers cholesterol and blood pressure. Include lots of it in your diet - see our recipes (coming soon) for ideas. If you don't like the taste, buy odorless garlic supplements in capsules, or tablets.

Powerful Health Supplements

Vitamin C increases the blood pressure lowering effect of garlic. Consult a natural health care professional like a qualified naturopath or medical herbalist for dosages. Tell them and your doctor what supplements and pharmaceutical drugs you are taking.

Certain supplements and drugs interact, so it's important for your health and safety that your health care professionals know exactly what you are taking, so they can give you the best advice.

There are a number of other herbal supplements with proven benefits for your heart. These include, grape seed extract or resveratrol, pine bark extract or pycnogenol, and hawthorn berries. Other antioxidant supplements include Vitamins A, C, and E and Co Enzyme Q10. See our supplements index (coming soon) for more details.

Ensuring you regularly use heart healthy recipes and take appropriate supplements can improve your heart health in a relatively short period, particularly when you follow a suitable exercise program.