Healthy Eating

Diet is the single most important predictor of health, according to David L. Katz, MD, MPH, founder and former director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center in Connecticut. Numerous studies have drawn a clear line between unhealthy eating habits and mortality. A healthy diet and lifestyle are the keys to preventing and managing cardiovascular disease.

What’s on Your Plate?

By using The Healthy Eating Plate as a guideline, you can see what a healthier, balanced meal may look like. The Healthy Eating Plate was created by nutrition experts at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and editors at Harvard Health Publications. It provides detailed guidance to help people make the best eating choices.

Picking the Right Diet

With so many diets and food fads it is important to choose what will best support your heart health.

The Mediterranean diet, the DASH diet, and the MIND diet collectively are a healthy eating platform. Each is a very healthy way of eating with a lot of similarities. They are low in saturated fat, processed foods, and sodium and high in fiber, vitamins, and minerals that can impact your heart health significantly.

• The Mediterranean diet is an eating pattern based on tradition and supported by science. It is a healthful and nutrient rich pattern, and offers numerous options for culinary variation. The Advisory Committee to the US Dietary Guidelines recommends an eating pattern that includes a higher intake of whole and minimally processed foods including vegetables, fruit, legumes, whole grains, low or non-fat dairy, lean meat, seafood, nuts, and unsaturated vegetable oils as well as a lower consumption of red and processed meats, sugar-sweetened foods and drinks, and refined grains.
• The DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet was originally a research project in 1997, developed by the National, Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, to see if including certain foods in one’s diet could lower blood pressure. The diet not only lowered blood pressure, but it also lowered cholesterol.
• The MIND Diet (Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay), is a hybrid of the Mediterranean diet and the DASH diet with a few tweaks; it originated with researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. It includes foods from both of these eating plans, and also includes foods that show the most compelling evidence for slowing decline in mental abilities and preventing dementia.