Healthy Diets: Heart Disease, Diabetes

Recipe for Health

Diet is a key ingredient in preventing heart disease, diabetes, and osteoporosis

You are what you eat--especially in terms of keeping certain diseases at bay, like heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, and more. That's why following a healthy diet--along with getting regular exercise, employing other lifestyle strategies, and making the most of medical options--should be on the top of your to-do list. Here's what you need to know from a nutritional standpoint.

Hindering Heart Disease

If cancer tops your list of health worries, you're not alone. Studies have shown that women tend to overestimate their chances of getting cancer, and they fail to think enough about a much more serious health threat: heart disease.


More than one in two women will die from a stroke, heart attack, or other forms of heart disease. Cancer deserves serious attention, but it's a distant second to heart disease, which plagues about one in five women.


Even though heart disease threatens more American women (and men) than any other health condition, it's nearly always preventable. Studies have shown that women who follow healthy diets and lifestyles--refraining from smoking, exercising regularly, eating healthful foods, and so on--can slash their risk of heart disease by 82 percent.


Even if you're premenopausal, don't put off taking care of your heart. More than one in five women who have heart attacks are under age 65.


It's true that a woman's risk of heart disease increases as she gets older. After menopause, when the body's production of estrogen declines, there's an increase in atherosclerosis--the accumulation of fatty deposits in the arteries that can reduce blood flow and increase the risk of heart-damaging clots. But atherosclerosis actually starts much earlier."We see the beginnings of it in teenagers," says Rose Marie Robertson, M.D., professor of medicine and director of the Women's Heart Institute at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. "Many women have the sense that they don't need to worry about heart disease until after menopause. But they may be ignoring risk factors that could be treated, such as high blood pressure or high cholesterol, because they don't think they have to worry about them yet."


Here's what the country's leading cardiologists say women should be doing, nutritionally, to protect their hearts with healthy diets. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables each day. Women who follow this simple advice can dramatically reduce their risk for heart disease.


What makes fruits and vegetables so powerful? They're packed with antioxidants--powerful plant chemicals that block the effects of free radicals, harmful oxygen molecules in the body that make cholesterol more likely to stick to artery walls.

Published December 2011, Prevention
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