UC Davis Health
A Dietitian's Guide to Heart-Healthy Meals
Your heart is a very important muscle. The heart’s job is to pump blood and carry oxygen all throughout your body via a “highway” of blood vessels (arteries and veins). Following a few simple nutrition tips can help keep your heart strong and keep blood vessels clear of blockages. Margaret Junker, a registered dietitian in UC Davis Health's Preventive Cardiology Program, offers this simple guide to eating heart-healthy meals and answers some of the most common questions she gets from patients.
Read more about starting a heart-healthy diet: https://health.ucdavis.edu/news/health-wellness/qa-are-there-good-and-bad-foods-in-a-heart-healthy-diet/2024/02
Additional resources for healthy eating:
Brain Food for Brain Health: https://youtu.be/qa7zGZmiLNk
“Life's Simple 7” for Heart Health: https://youtu.be/zKLaF2SS1v0
Tips to Boost Your Immune System: https://youtu.be/SQTF60lp8Uo
Organic Food: Worth the Hype? (Podcast): https://youtu.be/m6bW5VObt1Y
How to Cook “Flavor-Bombed Tofu Tacos”: https://youtu.be/-4vcGeqbnKE
Good Food is Good Medicine blog: https://health.ucdavis.edu/blog/good-food
See the latest news from UC Davis Health: https://health.ucdavis.edu/newsroom
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0:00 What is a heart-healthy diet?
1:44 Daily recommended servings of fruits and vegetables
2:58 Heart-healthy sources of protein
4:35 The difference between good and bad fats
6:38 What are the best oils to use for cooking?
7:38 How to reduce sodium in your diet
11:07 Is a vegan or vegetarian diet essential for heart health?
12:07 Encouraging kids to eat heart-healthy meals
The information in this video was accurate as of the upload date, 2/21/24. For information purposes only. Consult your local medical authority for advice.
#hearthealth #heartmonth #healthyeating #cookingtips #ourhearts
(gentle music) – A heart healthy diet is a general healthy diet that's gonna go ahead and treat and prevent heart disease as well as diabetes and help prevent cancer and also arthritis and other inflammatory illnesses. So yes, it's a heart healthy diet, but it's important to know that it's not necessarily a special diet, and it's not necessarily, you could only follow a heart healthy diet if you have heart disease. A heart healthy diet is a Mediterranean diet and it's the diet that's recommended for everybody of all ages for prevention and treatment. (gentle music) So one of the things is making sure that you're getting your fruits and vegetables. Now, we can't take that lightly, because a healthy or Mediterranean diet is a diet that's really a plant-based diet. So it's a plant-forward diet, where really the quote meat, but it's not meat of our diet, that is really the center of our plate should be those plant-based foods. So kind of switching where, like I grew up Italian, Sicilian Italian, and we grew up on the sausage or the pork chop or the steak. That would be our center point, and it seems with American food, it's usually either a large meat portion that's the center. What are you having for dinner? We're having pork chops. You know, that's the answer. Or what happens is the carbohydrate is the center of the plate. You know, the whole plate is spaghetti, or the whole plate is rice. So the switch is kind of changing the percentages and having more of our plants the stars, more fruits and vegetables the stars, and then backing off on the portions of especially meats and high fat dairy and simple carbohydrates. (gentle music) So the minimum amount is two servings of fruit, and let's remember that a serving a fruit, of any kind of fruit is about the our fist. You know, that's about a serving, a medium piece, and we have some grapefruit right here. So this is a larger grapefruit, so it's probably like a serving and a half. We want least two servings of fruit, but if you think of bananas. Now, when I go to the store, there's huge bananas, so some bananas could be equivalent to two or if not three servings. So we're thinking at least two to three servings of fruit each day, and even if you're living with diabetes and sometimes people are worried about the sugars. It's natural sugar that's high in fiber without any additives, so we don't worry about it. Even if you're living with diabetes, I want you to eat your fruit and not worry about it. Now in terms of vegetables, a serving of raw vegetables like a spinach would be about your fist or a cup, and a serving of cooked vegetables is a half a cup. We want a minimum of three per day. I would prefer even like six to 11. You can't get too many, especially of the non-starchy vegetables. (gentle music) Protein's just an incredibly important part of our diet, and I think one of the issues with protein, though, especially when it comes to meat and milk products, is that those serving sizes are too large, and with the healthy Mediterranean diet that's more plant-forward, you could have those animal products, but then you watch the portion sizes. And so I think a proper portion size for like if you're having poultry or especially if you're having beef, you know, fish, and fish as well, fish would be about six ounces. I think poultry would be four to six ounces, and if it was beef, I'd go ahead and pull it back and do closer to three ounces per serving size. And then think that there's other sources of protein as well. We have our nuts and seeds here. A serving a nuts and seeds is a couple tablespoons, or 1/4 cup, and we also have the Greek yogurt good over there that's the non-fat that gives a great source of protein and the serving size is about 3/4 cups. One thing when I talk to my patients about protein, they say, "I wanna get healthy and so I wanna increase my protein." And they feel like a high protein diet equals muscles, and with reality, what we need is adequate amounts of protein, but we need adequate amounts of calories and a healthy variety of fruits and an adequate amount of protein, and then working the muscle is what builds muscle. So just eating protein does not equal lean body mass. It's working the muscle that equals lean body mass. (gentle music) Let me give you an example. So eggs. A lot of times my patients say, "Oh, you know, I'm eating eggs, and I know eggs are bad for me." Well, the truth of the matter is eggs are loaded with the vitamins and minerals. The egg whites is a lean protein, and it's the yolk that's still really high in vitamins, that has saturated fat that's known to, and saturated fat is known to not be the best for heart disease. So a lot of times, people say, "I won't have an egg," but then later on the day, they'll make a whole bunch of other food choices that are high in saturated fat, and they judge the egg. And again, it's more about knowing what foods are high in saturated fat, and those are the saturated fat and trans fatty acids, are the ones we wanna avoid. So it's gaining the knowledge. Usually fat from animal sources are high in saturated fat, as well as palm oil and coconut oils. And then of course, we wanna stay away from trans fats. So let's look at in our diet, throughout our whole day, what foods might I choose that are high in saturated fat? And then if you want two eggs in that day, that has about the recommended amount of saturated fat and cholesterol for the day, then that could be your higher saturated fat choice and you don't have to worry about it, and then the rest of the day, pick plant-based proteins like beans or legumes or make sure you have chicken without the skin, and so that so you balance the higher fat or higher saturated fats as opposed to having 'em be something that you never have. And so healthy fats are like olive oil, avocado oil, canola oil. I love some of the sprays 'cause you have less oil overall. We have pumpkin seeds here, which I love. So nuts and seeds. We have some almonds right here. Those are like the plant-based fats that are so great for you. And again, we wanna avoid the fats from milk products and meat products. (gentle music) So with oils, what I love, you want oils that are liquid at room temperature, so those are the oils that are generally better for you. And I always think about what flavor profile am I going for? So olive oil's terrific. It's a healthy heart oil, and I love it when I'm sauteing tomatoes with onions and garlic, for example. But that's not always the flavor profile that I want. So if I'm cooking Mexican food, I may use an organic canola oil, or if I'm frying something and I need something for a higher cooking temperature, I may use avocado oil. So there's a variety of oils, depending on what your flavor profile is, as well as the temperature you're cooking at, is what you wanna look at. One of my favorites now is baking with walnut oil, because it's a healthy heart oil and it adds a really wonderful nutty flavor to your baking products. (gentle music) The majority of sodium that we intake is either through added salt added at the table in cooking or at the table, or through processed foods, and then also eating out as well. So that's where we get most of our sodium. Because of busyness and Americans' reliance on processed food, much of the sodium we take in are from boxed or packaged products and bakery products as well. But cutting back on our sodium is imperative. We have an epidemic of high blood pressure in this country and heart disease, and we know that excess sodium, there's a direct link to that, and hypertension, for example. So one of the things to start looking at is what packaged products are you purchasing, and what products, you know, how much sodium? The recommended amount for sodium is less than 2,400 milligrams per day of sodium, when the average American gets 4,000 milligrams of sodium. So just start when you're looking at products, look at that food label and look at sodium, and you wanna just try and purchase the products that have the lowest amounts of sodium. Keeping in mind, if your aim is 2,400 for the whole day, you don't want more than like 500 per meal. Especially important like with frozen lunch, you know, entrees, frozen products, if you see a frozen product and it's 1,800 milligrams of sodium, that's almost your entire day, so then you wanna try and choose another product. And also be cautious of some of those home delivered meals, that you prepare yourself or are delivered to you. Some of them, each meal could be as much sodium as you take for the whole day, too. So become more aware. Read the food labels, become more aware, and then when you reach for the salt shaker at home, ask yourself, "Is there another way I could flavor this food?" There are literally hundreds of just wonderful herbs and spices, and again, in American culture, we lean towards salt, but in other countries, even like Africa and India that are using curry powders and just different kinds of chili powders and so many other things to cook with. So think about herbs and spices. There's a lot more herb blends on the market now, like, for example, Italian herb blend and it's dried with basil, oregano, and thyme. You can mix them yourselves so you could purchase those. So either fresh herbs or herb blends. I love it. One of my favorite things to add more flavor, I put green onions in everything, because it adds a lot of flavor without salt. Regular onions, garlic. I love finishing off a dish with lime or lemons. It's Meyer lemons from our tree. The other day, I made some turmeric rice, and at the end of making it, when it was on the plate, I just put a little squeeze of lime, and my husband's like, "That added so much more flavor and it added so much more pop." So again, add fresh herbs or dried herbs. Onions or other natural vegetables that add flavor, or citrus, and of course, I picked some rosemary from my garden, and it just smells so good, to have it inside either for aromatherapy as well as for culinary purposes. (gentle music) There's different schools of thought on that, and part of it also depends on your diagnosis. And so if you came into UC Davis with severe coronary artery disease, the doctor may recommend a stricter vegan or vegetarian diet for you, and that's something that I'd want you to work closely with a registered dietician to make sure that you're getting all the nutrients that you need. It's not absolutely imperative, but it is important that all of us start moving our diet to being more plant-forward. If we think of what is a Mediterranean diet, it really is a vegetarian diet that then we add small amounts of fish, small amounts of poultry, and more rarely, maybe one or two times a month, small amounts of beef. So yes, being more plant-forward and kind of limiting the amount of animal products that we have is important for health. (gentle music) It's about making our family culture just naturally healthy diet. So it's not putting them on a diet, and it's not telling them, "You have to eat healthy now." It just becomes who you are as a family, and so that's the way to do it. Kids generally over time will desire a liking to foods that they're introduced to. So I think if mom and dad decides that we're gonna go ahead and have berries available on a regular basis, we're gonna be serving green leafy vegetables, we're gonna be having some plant-based meals with beans as opposed to meat, we're gonna be having nuts for snack after soccer practice as opposed to buying a donut. So when we start doing that, even if the children start eating those foods and saying, "I don't like it," and if it's a change, they're used to that salty-sweet, they might complain, or they just haven't developed the taste buds yet. So my encouragement is just keep doing it. Don't make separate meals meals for them. Just keep going ahead and presenting healthy food choices, and parents choose what's available to the children when the children will choose how much they're going to eat without the parents becoming a short order cook, where they're gonna go ahead and make something different. Just keep presenting healthy foods, and then over time, it may take them multiple times of tasting something like spinach before they like the flavor, but eventually I believe that they will. Please don't make it a power struggle. If they don't like it, just let it go. (gentle music)
#Dietitians #Guide #HeartHealthy #Meals
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thanks!
Along with Healthy Heart Meals one can take natural remedy —Arjun Tea by Planet Ayurveda which includes Natural Co Q 10
Good video but not all the advice here is healthy adivce, but I am sure she is told to throw in that bad advice stuff. Do your own research, as knowledge is powerful. There is good & bad in everything. Cornola oil is bad & spray oils are bad. Use unrefined coldpress oils like olive, avocado & coconut oils. As for salt & Sodium intake, package foods have bad Sodium yes & white tabletop salt is bad but you can use real natural salts like sea salt & Himalayan salts as these salts are high in natural minerals which the body needs & there is a wide variety of these healthier choices of natural salts. As for natural sugars & bad factory added sugars always choose real natural sugars as in fruits or real honey. I was diabetic but have been free of diabetes for 8 yrs now & I eat real local honey every day about 2 – 3 tables a day & my A1c stays at around 5.4. They are finally coming out with the truth about most store bought honey is fake or adulterated honey. I buy my honey from local beekeepers. The only honey I buy that is not local is high grade manuka honey but you must know yourself on a deep level to know what your body needs to stay truly healthy. A lot also has to do with how much one moves their body's throughout the day (exercising type moving, not normal day to day moving). I am very active & the more active one is the body breaks down food better & properly but if your someone who is not active much throughout the day your body works slower & for some ppl this is why they experience spikes in blood sugar when they eat some fruits or real honey. Eating right, healthy & keeping active is key in helping our body's process what we put in it. I'm speaking from personal experience, as prior to 2016 I weighed over 300lbs, mile long list of health issues & on 30+ pharmaceutical meds. Today I am at 185lbs, resolved most all my physical health issues & on only 1 pharmaceutical medicine. I am not a Dr or nutritionist. I can only speak from my own personal experience of learning, research & trial & error.
And bananas have the highest sugar Contant of any fruit! If you’re not a diabetic then you should still treat fruit as an occasional dessert. Modern technology has made fruit available all year around.
Spinach is one of the dirty dozen vegetables that should never ever be eaten unless it’s organic.
Look up, The dirty dozen.
Also need to watch how many vegetables, you eat, that are high in oxalates.
If you have heart problems you do need to watch your cholesterol & how many eggs you eat in a week.
If you do not have heart problems, eggs are OK.
Woman doesn’t know what she’s talking about. I’m surprise she doesn’t bring up the food pyramid scam that Western medical doctors push.
It’s alarming how much salt and fat/additives are in prepackaged foods and it’s to the point where I make everything by scratch. I’m surprised you didn’t mention garlic.
No oils are good. Only olive avocado butter and rendered fats
It's keep the smell from the intake as well as the out take .
Wait, she said frying? 🤦🏼♀️ that’s the WORST!
Thx for ur adyces
This woman is living proof that these folks are like religious fundamentalists. There is no good research to support any of the claims she is making. This isn't science. The best thing you can do to protect your heart is stop listening to people who continue to make dietary claims that they can't back up with numbers–show me the research for these claims and I will show you crap research. Basic biology 101 is all you need to know this woman's recommendations are dangerous to your health.
Canola oil is healthy???
I'm a diabetic and when I eat bananas, it definitely spikes my blood sugar. So, for me, pineapple & bananas are off limits. The body converts natural sugar just like refined sugar. I'm not a doctor, I just let my blood sugar meter determine what's good for me to eat.
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