The Western Diet: a Heart Disease Nightmare

Seen from the perspective of a medical nightmare, the modern Western diet is a recipe for inflam­matory diseases such as heart disease. It is high in saturated fats and low in the omega 3 polyunsaturates. It contains low levels of antioxidants, and correspondingly high levels of COPS and LOPS compounds. It is low in the anti-inflammatory sterols and flavonoids. It contains far too much digestible carbohydrates, thus driving up the formation of AGE products inside the body; uses many cooking processes that produce these in our foods; and is low in naturally occurring foods such as the flavonoids that would otherwise slow AGE formation in our bodies. Finally, it is low in the micronutrients required by the processes of tissue healing, which would otherwise repair the damage done by all the above runaway processes.

If, as the years pass, the rate of tissue damage consistently out­paces the rate of healing, our arteries must become more inflamed, more constricted, and more clogged with atheroma. For broadly the same reasons our veins are also inflamed, leading to varicose veins, and our platelets are too sticky, increasing the risk of blood clot formation, heart attacks and strokes.

This is nothing to do with the aging process. There are cultures where the risk of hypertension and heart disease is low, and does not increase with age. Our Western version of normality, where heart and vascular disease kills one in every two people, is in fact a construct, and nothing more than the consequence of sustained dietary and lifestyle imbalance. So how do we rectify this imbal­ance, and steer our skewed metabolisms away from disease and towards health?

Ways to a healthy heart you ask?

To begin with there are the four time-honored steps to better living as preached by the health authorities:

• give up smoking

• take more exercise

• eat more fruit and vegetables

• lose excess weight.

Such a program would dramatically improve our health prospects but the statistics tell us, sadly, that these seemingly simple lifestyle changes are hard to implement. We are not smoking noticeably less, we are taking less exercise rather then more, trends in fruit and vegetable consumption are consistently down, and we are heavier than ever.

The healthy heart diet is as a fantastic tool:

The guidelines for healthy heart eating are fairly straightforward and supported by strong clinical evidence reported in a wide range of respected journals.

• Eat plenty of fruit and vegetables, especially the flavonoid-rich foods such as apples, blackberries, walnuts, tomatoes, cabbage and lettuce.

• Drink a large glass (350 ml/0.75 pint) of citrus juice everyday.

• Eat plenty of vitamin K in the form of spinach, kale or broccoli.

• Cut back on margarines and polyunsaturated vegetable oils; switch to mono-unsaturates such as olive or rape-seed oil.

• Most types of bean and oat-based foods can help reduce blood cholesterol levels, so increase foods such as lentils, frijole negro (black) beans, chick peas, red kidney beans and porridge in your diet.

• Eat oily fish such as trout, salmon or mackerel twice a week.

All will help endlessly in a healthier you.