Eating a healthy diet can help your heart stay healthy

By Chief John Rindfleish
CLINTON FIRE CHIEF
In a continuation from last week, we need to look at more factors to having a healthy heart. Eating a healthy diet can reduce your risk of heart disease.
A diet rich in fruits, vege-tables and whole grains can help protect your heart. Aim to eat beans, low-fat or fat-free dairy products, lean meats, and fish as part of a healthy diet.
Always try and avoid too much salt and sugars in your diet. Limiting certain fats, you eat also is important. Of all the types of fat, saturated, polyunsaturated, monounsaturated, and trans-fat, try to limit or avoid saturated fat and trans-fat.
Aim to keep saturated fat to 5 or 6 percent of your daily calories. And try to keep trans-fat out of your diet altogether. Some of the major sources of saturated fat include red meat, full-fat dairy products, coconut, and palm oils.
Sources of trans fat in-clude, deep-fried fast foods, bakery products, packaged snack foods, margarines, crackers, chips, and cookies. If the nutrition label has the term “partially hydrogenated” or “hydrogenated,” it means that product contains trans-fat. But you don’t have to cut all fats out of your diet.
Healthy fats from plant-based sources, such as avo-cado, nuts, olives, and olive oil, help your heart by lowering the bad type of cholesterol.
Most people need to add more fruits and vegetables to their diets, your goal should be five to ten servings a day.
many fruits and vegetables not only can help prevent heart disease, but also may help improve your blood pressure and cholesterol levels, and improve diabe-tes.
Eating two or more serv-ings a week of certain fish, such as salmon and tuna, may decrease your risk of heart disease. Being overweight, especially if you carry excess weight around your middle, in-creases your risk of heart disease.
Excess weight can lead to conditions that increase your chances of heart disease, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes.
Metabolic syndrome, a combination of fat around your abdomen, high blood pressure, high blood sugar and high triglycerides, also increases the risk of heart disease.
One way to see if your weight is healthy is to calcu-late your

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