A healthy diet and lifestyle are your best weapons to fight against cardiovascular disease. Today Heart disease may be the leading killer for men and women, but it doesn’t mean you can’t protect yourself. In addition to exercise, being careful about what you eat, and what you don’t eat. There are various causes for the heart disease such as ageing, genetics, lifestyle, smoking, diabetes.

Improving your diet is an important step towards preventing heart disease. A person should eat a little bit of lots of different types of food for good heath since no one food has everything in it that your body requires.

• Balance your eating with physical activity how much you eat with how much you burn it off with exercise, you will have a good chance of keeping at a good weight throughout your life time.
• Choose a diet with plenty of Grains, Fruits and vegetables, like have a whole fruit a day, Include vegetable salads in your major meals because a diet high in fiber can lower “bad” cholesterol and provide nutrients that can help protect against heart disease.
• Choose a diet low in fat, chose low fat dairy products, saying no to red meat, Cut off chicken with skin
• Choose a diet low in sugars, Eating too many sweets fills up with fat in the body which leads to gaining weight
• Choose a diet low in salt, Cut down the salty snacks like chips, Cut down on packaged foods.
• Add a fistful of nuts in your diet mainly almonds and walnuts which are the good sources of HDL (good cholesterol).
• Add flax seeds in your diet that are high in fiber and omega-3 fatty acids, which can lower your total blood cholesterol.
• Read Nutrition Facts labels carefully — the Nutrition Facts panel tells you the amount of healthy and unhealthy nutrients in a food or beverage.
• Drink alcohol, drink in moderation.

Harita Shyam &  D. Swetha sri
Department of Clinical Nutrition, Apollo Hospitals Hyderabad