The right diet can help keep your heart healthy

Your heart is one of the most important organs in the body, and the foods you eat affect 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 are to your taste and you will be on the road to preventing heart disease.

Good Cholesterol

Cholesterol is an important thing to consider 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. Most people do not need to acquire LDL from foods. Our bodies make enough of this kind of cholesterol on its own. It is the LDL cholesterol that can damage our hearts, not the HDL cholesterol, which actually helps our hearts be reducing the amount of LDL cholesterol in the body.

Bad Cholesterol

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 flow, because the artery becomes smaller. This means that your heart has to pump harder and faster in order to allow the same amount of blood to flow (at a higher pressure) through your body. Over time, this makes your heart tired and can weaken it. In the worst-case scenario, the blood vessel becomes so built up with LDL cholesterol that your artery closes completely. 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. When it reaches a smaller part of the blood vessel, it will get stuck and block the blood, which again causes a heart attack. 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 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. If you have high cholesterol and are finding it difficult to reduce you could try the ebook from Frank Cooper, who is a qualified Clinical Nutritionist – he advocates a natural way to reduce cholesterol, which avoids the side- effects of drugs that many sufferes depend on.