WHAT TO EAT TO BEAT HEART DISEASE
By the nutritionist who’s spent his life studying which foods protect us from illness
ALL THIS week, we are highlighting the power of food to stop major preventable killers. Dr Michael Greger is the leading voice for the healing power of diet and lifestyle, and when we serialised his book How Not To Die in 2016, it became a UK bestseller. Now he’s released a recipe book packed with tasty meals to make it easier to eat a wholefood, plant-based diet. In Saturday’s paper we outlined his Daily Dozen — the blueprint for a disease-busting diet — with recipes that even meateaters are sure to love. Today, he shows how a plant-based diet can protect you and your family against one of the UK’s biggest killers: heart disease.
Heart disease is one of the top three reasons that we and most of our loved ones will die, and I am convinced our poor Western diet has a lot to answer for.
the biggest true risk factor for coronary heart disease is cholesterol.
Indeed, it’s been convincingly argued that you could be an obese, diabetic, smoking couch potato and still not develop the disease — provided the cholesterol level in your blood is low enough.
But far too many people have raised cholesterol levels because of their poor diets.
For most people raised on a conventional Western diet, cholesterol-rich gunk (plaque) accumulates inside the blood vessels that supply the heart with oxygen-rich blood.
this can lead to chest pain and pressure, known as angina. and if the plaque ruptures, a blood clot can form within the artery and cause a heart attack.
High cholesterol levels are raised by eating a diet packed with specific types of fats. these include trans fats, which you find in processed foods, meat and dairy products; saturated fat, found chiefly in animal products and junk foods; and, to a lesser extent, dietary cholesterol, which is found exclusively in animal-derived foods such as eggs.
the problem is, unhealthy, fatty meals don’t only cause internal damage decades into the future — they can trigger problems within hours of going into your mouth.
We’ve known for nearly two decades, for instance, that a single fast-food meal (Sausage & egg McMuffins were used in the original study) is enough to stiffen your arteries within hours, halving their ability to relax normally.
But the good news is that you can reverse this damaging process just as swiftly.
there have been studies of patients with advanced heart disease who switched to plantbased diets in the hope this would stop the disease progressing further. But instead, something miraculous happened: the patients’ heart disease actually started to reverse.
they weren’t simply slowing the condition, they were actually getting better!
It seems that as soon as they stopped eating artery-clogging
diets, their bodies were able to start dissolving some of the plaque that had built up.
Dr Dean Ornish, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, was the first scientist to prove in a randomised controlled trial that a plant-based diet and other healthy lifestyle changes could actually reverse heart disease.
Your body will regain health if you let it. But if you reinjure yourself three times a day at every mealtime, you interrupt the healing process.
It is clear that, given the right conditions, the body really can heal itself. This helps to explain why cardiac patients quickly experience relief when put on a diet made up of plant foods including fruit, vegetables, whole grains and beans.
One study reported a 91 per cent reduction in angina attacks within just a few weeks of patients starting plant-based diets.
This occurred well before their bodies could have cleared the plaque from their arteries.
In contrast, patients who didn’t change their diets had a 186 per cent increase in angina attacks.
Most GPs prescribe cholesterollowering statins if you’re at risk of heart attacks, so why change your diet if you can simply pop a pill?
Unfortunately, these drugs may cause undesirable side-effects, such as liver and muscle damage.
A better question to ask might be: why accept any risk if you can lower your cholesterol naturally?
Numerous studies show that many of our Western epidemics of chronic disease, including coronary heart disease, simply didn’t occur in Chinese or rural African populations who ate plant-based diets.
But when you look at populations from these countries who came to live in the West, disease rates skyrocketed as they adopted our meat-based, sugar-laced, junkfood diet.
So what did the Africans and Chinese have in common? Simple: their diets were centred on plantderived grains and vegetables.
This means heart disease could be a choice, not a genetic inevitability.
If you are worried about your heart health, it is certainly worth considering cutting down on your consumption of meat — and it’s not only for the fat content, meat also appears to harbour endotoxin-laden bacteria, which can trigger inflammation in your arteries, even when food is fully cooked.
You should also start striving to meet my Daily Dozen recommendations (see box below), which will help improve your heart’s health.
Even if your parents died from heart disease, you should be able to eat your way to a healthy heart.
You share 50 per cent of your genes with each parent, so if one dies of a heart attack, you might have inherited some of that susceptibility. However, one reason why certain diseases tend to run in families may be that diets tend to run in families, too.
With a good diet, your family history does not have to become your destiny.
You can choose to stop hurting yourself and let your body’s natural healing process succeed.