Best recipe for a healthy HEART

LISTEN to your heart’ is normally something you find written in the pages of romantic fiction, but it’s also excellent medical advice. As the poets point out, a good heart is essential for a long and happy life.

This small, fist-sized organ does an extraordinary job of pushing five litres of blood through the 60,000 miles of blood vessels in your body 70 times a minute, 100,000 times a day — three billion times during your lifetime. And we need to look after it.

The trouble for many people is that their heart is ageing faster than it should: heart disease is the biggest killer of men in the UK, while in women it is number two, after dementia.

At 63 I have already lost a couple of close male friends to heart failure, as well as my father.

Most heart-related deaths occur as a result of coronary heart disease — furred-up or blocked arteries — which occurs when fatty plaques develop in the arteries.

This reduces blood flow, causing angina (or chest pain) on exertion, or breathlessness. over time, fragments of the plaques can tear off, blocking an artery and causing a heart attack or stroke.

The effects can be devastating. Even if you survive a heart attack, it’s often followed by heart failure, where damage to the heart muscle means it can’t pump as efficiently, so even something as simple as climbing stairs or walking from one room to another can become difficult.

So how can you reduce the chance of this happening? Staying active is vital — the heart is, after all, a muscle and needs to be worked just as your biceps do. But just as important is to stop smoking, check your blood pressure and, if your waist is expanding, lose weight.

Being overweight means the heart has to work that much harder to push blood around the body — as well as putting strain on the heart, this raises blood pressure.

And it’s not just the fat you can see that causes problems — so, too, does the visceral fat, the internal fat that forms around the organs such as the heart and liver.

This not only raises your blood pressure and your levels of damaging blood fats, but it increases your risk of type 2 diabetes. The good news is you can turn this around, fast. Recent research has shown that one of the best ways to lose weight, and protect your heart, is through a rapid weight-loss diet such as my Fast 800 Easy, which the Mail has been publishing in this unique Eat To Beat Disease series.

Just what a difference it can make was highlighted by a recent study of 278 overweight or obese patients, published by researchers from oxford University in the BMJ in 2018.

This study found that the patients who followed an 800calorie diet for eight weeks not only lost 23lb (10.7kg), and kept it off for a year.

Their blood pressure, blood sugar levels and blood fats also improved significantly compared with patients in the control group who received standard care. In another study, from 2017, researchers at the University of Surrey put two groups of overweight people on either a standard slow- and-steady diet or the 5:2 approach.

This approach involves eating healthily for five days a week and cutting back for two days a week.

Not only did the 5:2 dieters lose more weight, more quickly, but they saw bigger falls in blood pressure (down by 9 per compared to 3 per cent in the other group).

when the researchers gave the dieters a fatty meal it was the 5:2ers who were able to clear the fat from their blood fastest. This study was small — involving only 27 people — but the results were still pretty impressive.

WITH the Fast 800 Easy approach, we recommend you start with rapid weight loss, 800 calories a day, every day, for several weeks, followed by my 5:2 plan, where you stick to 800 calories a day, but only twice a week, until you reach your goals, when you move on to the longer term maintenance phase.

To help you, all this week we

have been publishing delicious and easy-to-prepare Fast 800 recipes developed by my wife, Clare, who is a GP with years of experience helping patients tackle their health problems through diet — and more recently, with a low-carb, low-calorie approach.

The recipes are quick and easy to prepare and many are based on store cupboard favourites, cutting down on the number of trips you have to make to the supermarket (and also making them inexpensive).

And while today’s recipes are geared in particular to heart health, they will help anyone who wants to lose weight and improve their health.

The basic elements of the diet (both the rapid weight-loss phase and the longer term maintenance phase) are based on the Mediterranean diet — the benefits of which were well demonstrated in one of most important nutrition studies ever carried out: the Predimed study published in 2013.

Here Spanish researchers recruited more than 7,400 overweight, middleaged men and women and randomly allocated them to either a Mediterranean or a low-fat diet.

Both groups were encouraged to eat lots of fresh fruit, vegetables and legumes (such as beans, lentils and peas).

They were discouraged from consuming sugary drinks, cakes, sweets or pastries and from eating too much processed meat such as bacon or salami.

Those allocated to the Mediterranean diet were asked to eat plenty of eggs, nuts and oily fish and use lots of olive oil, and encouraged to eat some dark chocolate and enjoy the occasional glass of wine with their evening meal.

In contrast, the low-fat diet group were told to eat low-fat dairy products and plenty of starchy foods such as bread, potatoes, pasta and rice.

The volunteers were also asked to fill in food diaries and keep a check on their health via medical examinations, questionnaires and blood and urine samples. All volunteers were given an ‘M score’, according to how closely they stuck to the Mediterranean diet.

Within four years there were such dramatic differences between the two groups that the trial was stopped two years early.

Compared to the people on the lowfat diet, those allocated to the Mediterranean diet had a 30 per cent reduced risk of heart attack or stroke, as well as a 58 per cent reduced risk of type 2 diabetes, a 51 per cent reduced risk of breast cancer and a reduced risk of cognitive decline

Clare and I are convinced that once you try this way of eating you won’t want to go back. This isn’t just a diet — it’s a sustainable eating approach with sensational recipes that will help make you slimmer, fitter and reduce your risk of disease!

Check whether you are suitable for the rapid weight-loss part of my plan at