Eating Healthy for your Heart

Your heart is one of the most important organs in the body, and the foods you put into your mouth effect how your heart operates. If you want your heart to be strong and able to pump blood as well as possible all over your body, it is important for you to eat a healthy diet. Heart-healthy foods are readily available in the supermarket, so choose some that work for your personal likes 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-healthy foods. There are both good cholesterols and bad cholesterols. Good cholesterols are called HDL, and their job in the body is to take excess bad cholesterol (LDL) to the liver, where it can be broken down and then will leave the body. LDL is actually not needed by your body at all from foods. Our bodies make enough of this kind of cholesterol on its own. It is the LDL cholesterol that hurts our hearts, not the HDL cholesterol, which actually helps our hearts be reducing the amount of LDL cholesterol in the body.

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 causes a heart attack.

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. 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 simply important to cut out of your diet the foods high in cholesterol so that you can prevent heart disease and other problems in the body.

The Importance of Healthy Eating

Have you ever heard the saying you are what you eat? In some sense, this is true, because if you eat unhealthy foods you are prone to be an unhealthy person. The foods we ingest are extremely important to our ability to grow, maintain function, and prevent illness. Therefore, if you value your health, you should learn as much about healthy eating as possible.

Healthy eating is important from the day we are born. As a child, we grow quite rapidly and this is due in part to the foods we eat. Foods all contain nutrients that provide us not only with fuel to live our daily lives, but also with the very substances that build our bones, muscles, and organ tissues. Not getting enough of one nutrient or another can cause a variety of problems, including stunting our growth. For mothers who are nursing, nutrition is important because breast milk contains the nutrients a child needs to grow and develop properly. Upon growing older, these nutrients are then found in food, but don’t think that healthy eating isn’t important for growth after you’ve gone through puberty. Cells continuous break down and rebuild, so healthy eating for growth continues to be important until the day we die.

Maintaining function is also not important without healthy eating. In out daily lives, we use energy to think, walk, talk, breathe, and perform any other action. The energy it takes our body to do these things comes from two places: fat reserves in the body or our daily food intake. If you don’t eat healthy foods, you will find that you are storing more fat that necessary or that you aren’t getting enough and you feel sluggish or weak. Along with energy-providing nutrients, like fats and carbohydrates, we also need the right nutrients to allow our organs to do their jobs. Hormones and other substances in the body make sure that everything is working properly. If you don’t eat the right nutrients, your body cannot produce these hormones and, as a result, cannot function properly.

Lastly, healthy eating is important in order to prevent illness. When we do not get the right nutrients, or body’s natural defense system against diseases weakens, allowing viruses and bacteria to attack the body. It’s like a well-trained army—if the army doesn’t have enough to eat, it will not do well in battle. Without healthy foods and plenty of water, our bodies simply could not operate on a day-to-day basis. Learning how to eat healthy foods is therefore and important lesson, and one which we should begin learning as children.

HEALTHIEST FOODS

Majority of the foods our planet offer provides at least several of the nutrients our bodies require. These foods constitute the World's Healthiest Foods and they are the common "everyday" foods. These include the fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts and seeds, lean meats, fish, olive oil, herbs and spices that are familiar to most people.

Many foods that are exceptionally nutritious are not readily available in different areas. The World's Healthiest Foods are foods that the majority people can easily find at their local market. These foods are also not only familiar and available to the people, but are affordable, while retaining their freshness and great taste.

The World's Healthiest Foods have been selected because they are among the richest sources of many of the essential nutrients needed for optimal healthy. These Foods are also whole foods complete with all their rich natural endowment of nutrients. These foods have not been highly processed and they do not contain synthetic, artificial or irradiated ingredients. Purchasing "Organically Grown" foods is a highly recommended healthier way of eating, since they not only promote your health, but also the health of our planet.

NUTRIENT DENSITY

Nutrient density is the concept used to determine the foods that have the highest nutritional value. Nutrient density is a measure of the amount of nutrients a food contains in comparison to the number of calories. A food is said to be more nutrient dense when the level of nutrients it contains is high in relationship to the number of calories the food contains. Eating the World's Healthiest Foods, provides an individual with all the essential nutrients that he requires for excellent health, including vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, essential fatty acids, fiber and more for the least number of calories.

HEART FRIENDLY DIETS

The human heart remains one of the important organs found in the body and its operation is greatly affected by the quality of food that is taken into the body. If you want your heart to remain strong and able to continue to perform its basic function of pumping blood efficiently throughout the entire body, it is important that you eat healthy and heart friendly diets always. The right choice of heart friendly foods can help an individual prevent attack of heart diseases.

CHOLESTEROL INTAKE

When it comes to eating heart-healthy foods, Cholesterol is the most important thing to consider. Cholesterols are of two types; good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. Good cholesterols are called HDL, and their job in the body is to take excess bad cholesterol LDL (low-density lipoproteins) to the liver, where it can be broken down and eventually eliminated from the body.

The human body makes enough of LDL on its own and so do not require additional LDL derived from food. It is these excess LDL cholesterol that hurts the heart. HDL cholesterol on the other hand helps the heart by reducing the amount of LDL cholesterol in the body. As the name goes, this substance has a low density, and hence does not flow through the blood stream as readily as it should. The red blood cells easily release the LDL cholesterol which then sticks to the walls of the blood vessels, especially in the arteries leading to the heart.

This is bad for a number of reasons:

1. As the LDL cholesterol builds up on your arteries, the artery becomes smaller, hereby reducing the amount of blood that can fit through at a time.

2. The heart then works extra hard to pump the same amount of blood through the body, making the heart tired and weaker over time.

3. In the worst-case scenario, the blood vessel becomes so built up with LDL cholesterol that the artery could close completely.

4. 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.

5. 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.

It is simply important therefore, to cut out of your diet the foods high in cholesterol so that you can prevent heart disease and other problems in the body.

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT

If you eat unhealthy foods you are prone to be an unhealthy person. The foods we ingest are extremely important to our ability to grow, maintain function, and prevent illness. Healthy eating is important from the day we are born. As a child, we grow quite rapidly and this is due in part to the foods we eat. Foods all contain nutrients that provide us not only with fuel to live our daily lives, but also with the very substances that build our bones, muscles, and organ tissues. If you don’t eat healthy foods, you will find that you are storing more fat that necessary or that you aren’t getting enough and you feel sluggish or weak.