1st Womens Health News

Your heart is one of the most important organs in your body and the foods you eat effect how it operates. If you want your heart to be strong and healthy it is important for you to eat a healthy diet. Heart-healthy foods are available at the grocery store, so choose some that work for your personal likes and you should be able to prevent heart disease.

Cholesterol is the most important thing to consider when it comes to eating heart-healthy foods. There are both good cholesterols and bad cholesterols.

Good cholesterols are called HDL and their job is to take excess bad cholesterol to the liver, where it is broken down and then leaves the body. Bad cholesterols (LDL) are  actually not needed by your body at all from foods. Your body makes enough of this kind of cholesterol on its own. It is the bad cholesterol that hurts your heart. The good  cholesterol actually helps your heart by reducing the amount of LDL in the body.

LDL stands for low-density lipoproteins. Because this substance has a low density, it does not flow through the blood stream as easily as it should. The red blood cells release the LDL cholesterol and it sticks to the walls of your blood vessels, especially in the arteries leading to your heart. This is bad for a number of reasons.

First, when the LDL cholesterol builds up on your arteries, it reduces the amount of blood that can fit through at one time because the artery becomes smaller. That means your heart has to pump harder and faster in order to allow the same amount of blood to flow through your body.

Over time, this makes your heart tired and not as strong as it should be. In the worst-case scenario, the blood vessel becomes so built up with LDL cholesterol that your artery could close completely. When this happens, your heart “panics” because it is not getting the blood it needs and it beats rapidly to try to pump the blood. This causes a heart attack.

You can also have a heart attack from LDL cholesterol build-up if a piece of this build-up, called plaque, breaks off and floats into your blood stream. When it reaches a smaller part of the blood vessel, it will get stuck and block the blood flow, which again causes a heart attack.

If the piece of plaque travels to the brain instead of the heart, it will cause a blockage there, which in turn causes a stroke. Therefore, it is vitally important to cut out foods high in cholesterol to prevent heart disease an