It doesn't take a dietitian to tell you that eating right and physical activity go hand in hand. What's the point of doing heart-healthy exercise if you're going to eat a diet ridden with fat and cholesterol? The components of a heart-healthy diet include weight control, limiting total fat, saturated fat, trans fats, cholesterol and sodium. You may think that's a lot to do, but it might not be as hard as you think:
Weight control
You won't know exactly how many calories you need to maintain your weight unless you have access to what's known as an indirect calorimeter. So, for most of us, we have to use estimations.
One good place to start is to use the www.Mypyramid.gov Web site, which focuses on the Food Guide Pyramid and allows you to enter in information about yourself to get an approximate calorie level you need daily and how to achieve that with the various food groups. This information can be printed out for you to remember.
The other neat function on this site is the use of the MyPyramid Tracker, a feature that allows you to input what you eat and how much exercise you completed to track your habits and tweak them as needed to fulfill your goals.
Fat
Even too much of a good thing can be bad when it comes to total fat. Saturated fats and trans fats are more solid at room temperature and have been shown to increase total cholesterol in the body, which can cause clogging of the arteries.
Unsaturated fats (monounsaturated and polyunsaturated) are more liquid at room temperature and have been associated with helping to increase good cholesterol and, in some cases, help lower bad cholesterol.
Everyone should limit the total amount of fat to less than 30 percent of total calories, with the majority of those calories coming from monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats (olive oil, canola oil, safflower oil and salmon, for example).
Cholesterol
Your body creates all the cholesterol it needs to function. Eating a diet high in saturated fat, trans fat and cholesterol only adds to what your body makes. If your body cannot process and get rid of the extra that is absorbed from your diet, you will have high cholesterol, which is associated with higher incidence of heart attack and strokes.
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Sodium is in most processed foods and even some medications.
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Cholesterol is found in animal sources. It is recommended that you limit your total cholesterol intake to 300 milligrams for those without a history of heart disease and 200 milligrams for those with a history.
Soluble fiber (i.e. oatmeal, oat bran, beans and barley) has been shown to help lower cholesterol when combined with a diet lower in saturated fat, trans fat and cholesterol.
Sodium
Here's the one component that people struggle with the most. Why? Because old habits are hard to break. On average, people in the United States get more than 4,000 milligrams sodium per day. The recommended amount is 2,300 milligrams daily. The hard part about this recommendation is that sodium is added to just about every processed food and some medications. For example, two blue Alka-Seltzer tablets contain 1,040 milligrams.
One rule of thumb in regard to sodium is to buy fresh food. Beware of some meats; even though they appear fresh, they have been "enhanced" with a broth.
There has to be a food label on these products listing the amount of sodium per serving. When looking at food labels, shoot for less than 400 milligrams per serving on individual foods and less than 600 milligrams per serving for frozen meals.
Check out the American Heart Association's Web site (www.AmericanHeart.org). There is a section called Fat 101, which reviews in detail the types of fat, how they function in your body, and where they are found. There are also heart healthy recipes, ways to reduce sodium intake and how to properly read food labels.
Lisa M. Fish, M.S., R.D., LD/N, C.N.S.D., is a registered dietician and licensed nutritionist at Winter Haven Hospital.
