What Makes a Heart Healthy Diet?
If you are confused about what you should or shouldn’t eat to reduce your chances of developing heart disease—you’re not alone. Discerning the claims made about food and diets and interpreting the multitude of conflicting studies done on the subject would confound even the most astute. Thankfully, the good people of the Population Health Research Institute took on that task for us, and it turns out that the list of heart-healthy foods is a relatively short one. For the study, Andrew Mente, Ph.D. and colleagues rated 189 prior studies published between 1950 and 2007. When a certain food or diet showed a strong link with better heart health and appeared in multiple studies, that food or diet was put at the top of the “good” list, while foods linked to an increased risk of heart disease was place on the “bad” list. As you can probably guess, vegetables, nuts and the Mediterranean diet, which is high in vegetables, legumes, fruits, nuts, whole grains, cheese or yogurt and fish, made the “g
