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Optimising your diet for heart health

Your heart’s health can affect how your entire body performs, so it’s important that you make healthy lifestyle choices to support it. These choices can include exercise and avoiding things like stress, alcohol and cigarettes to avoid their effects on your blood pressure. Additionally, a healthy and nutritious diet can benefit heart health.

A heart-healthy diet can reduce the likelihood of developing conditions like high blood pressure and coronary heart disease, as well as lowering cholesterol levels. Other benefits include increased vitamin intake, helping to maintain a healthy weight and improving mood.

In this article we’ll look at:

How diet can affect the heart

What to encourage and avoid if you’re trying to have a heart-healthy diet

Quick tips and links to resources

How can my diet affect my heart?

Paying attention to your diet can help to maintain your heart health and reduce the risk of coronary heart disease, high cholesterol and high blood pressure. Diets with high levels of fats and sugars can increase your risk of developing these conditions and other health problems.

A heart-healthy diet focuses on foods that give your heart and body healthy nutrients. This is a long-term, gradual process and shouldn’t be confused with temporary dieting.

What food can support heart health?

Keeping hydrated

Drink 6-8 glasses of fluid (optimally water) a day.

Starchy foods

Food like potatoes, rice and pasta provide energy and can be a part of balanced meals with vegetables. These should form around a third of your daily food intake.

Protein sources

The following can be heart-healthy sources of protein:

Beans, peas and lentils are low in fat and high in fibre

Fish contains vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acids

Milk, cheese and yoghurt can provide protein and calcium (try lower-fat options)

Fruit and vegetables

Whether it’s fresh or frozen, added to your yoghurt or in a glass of juice, try to aim for five portions of fruit and vegetables daily.

Note that if you are going to drink your fruit and vegetables in a juice or smoothie, the NHS recommends that these should be limited to 150ml daily and drunk with meals to reduce the chance of tooth decay.

What should I try to avoid for my heart health?

Foods are unlikely to immediately damage your heart, but having too much of certain food and drink over a sustained period will increase the risk of you suffering from health problems.

For your heart health, it can be useful to reduce your intake of:

Salt – Excessive salt can increase the risk of high blood pressure and coronary heart disease
Saturated fat – Can increase blood cholesterol levels

Alcohol – Aim for no more than 14 units per week across at least three days (with some days without alcohol)

Sugar – Can gradually contribute to weight gain and tooth decay

Try and minimise the number of processed foods, sweet treats and red meat you eat.

Saturated fats

Consistently eating foods high in saturated fats can cause your cholesterol levels to rise, specifically LDL cholesterol. Too much of this cholesterol can lead to a build up of cholesterol and plaque in your blood vessels, which can then increase your risk of heart attacks and strokes.

This can be found in foods like:

Fatty or process red meat

Full-fat dairy

Cakes

Biscuits

Palm oil and coconut oil

UK guidelines recommend no more than 30g of saturated fat per day for men and 20g for women.

Unsaturated fats raises HDL cholesterol levels. This then moves cholesterol from parts of the body where there’s too much of it to the liver, where it’s disposed of. Foods that contain these include:

Nuts and seeds

Oily fish

Avocados

Olive and rapeseed oil

Planning healthy meals

There are several tools and resources you can use to help plan a healthy meal, some of which can be found on your food.

Nutrition information labels

Many pre-packed food use nutrition information labels to help you tell if a food is high, medium or low in fat, sugar, salt, etc. This is often seen as a traffic light label.

Red – high

The food is high in fat / saturated fat / sugar / salt. Eat these food less often or in smaller amounts to help your intake.

Amber – medium

Means the level is neither high nor low. Can be eaten as a part of a balanced diet.

Green – low

The food is low in the specific nutrient and is usually a healthier choice.

Pay attention to the portion size used to calculate the label information (e.g. if the label says per 100mg for a 700mg total box), as this might affect your recommended portion.

The Eatwell Guide

The Eatwell Guide defines the government’s recommendations on eating a healthy and balanced diet. It can be used for preparing meals to support heart health and overall wellbeing.