Heart disease is a chronic health problem that increases a persons risk for stroke, heart attack, and other health crises. Lifestyle choices can lead to heart disease, which means you have a great deal of control over the health of your heart.
Exercising, eating right, and reducing stress reduce your risk for developing heart disease. Unfortunately, many people make poor choices for years before realizing the damage they have caused their heart. Luckily, there is evidence that even late-in-life changes make a difference in heart health.
If you want to improve your heart health and reduce your risk for heart-related health conditions, consider the following:
Nutrition is Important
If a person wants to make small health improvements, only small dietary changes are needed. Eating healthy one day per week or eliminating one bad food from your diet is beneficial, but you will not experience dramatic change. Actually reversing heart disease requires a dramatic change in your eating habits.
The usual culprits: saturated and trans fat, excessive salt, and processed foods, will need to be all but eliminated from your diet. In addition to no longer eating foods associated with heart disease, you should also incorporate heart-healthy foods into your diet.
Some research shows a diet made of primarily of raw, vegan foods is the best option for undoing years of heart damage.
Raw Food Might be the Best Option
Raw food is food that is not heated to more than 118 degrees F. This eliminates meat, dairy, and traditional baked goods. The Raw Food Diet also encourages followers to avoid foods treated with pesticides, foods that are genetically modified (GMOs), processed, packaged, or prepared foods, and anything that is not organic.
Proponents of the Raw Food Diet for treating heart disease believe the lack of heating preserves enzymes found in plants. Eating raw foods alkalinizes the body and boosts immunity. There is also a belief that eating living, as opposed to cooked, dead food, is much healthier.
Regardless whether health professionals are in favor of a completely raw diet, most agree that boosting the fruit and vegetable content in a persons diet offers health benefits. If following an extreme diet makes it easier to eliminate unhealthy food and eat more heart healthy food, than going raw might be worth the change.
Dr. Dean Ornish
Dr. Dean Ornish is one of the best-known figures in the heart health industry. He determined it was possible to reduce heart disease by following a four-step regimen of health. He considers prevention the ideal treatment for heart disease and created a plan that includes dietary changes, fitness and stress management.
His book, The Spectrum: A Scientifically Proven Program to Feel Better, Lose Weight, and Gain Health, offers a 28-day plan that claims to reverse heart disease and help you build a healthier lifestyle. It claims that if readers follow the plan, it is possible to reduce the plaque that has collected on artery walls, potentially undoing decades of damage.
Even those without heart disease can benefit from the lifestyle changes. Ornishs plan is based on the theory that a plant-based diet of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes eaten in their natural, unrefined form not only helps to reverse heart disease, but also provide anti-cancer and anti-aging benefits.
The Ornish plan receives high marks from those in the medical community, including a #1 rating for heart health from U.S. News & World Reportin 2011 and 2012.
