5 Heart-Healthy Food Swaps
When it comes to your heart health, it’s the little, everyday choices you make that can have the biggest impact on your future well-being. Along with exercising consistently and avoiding smoking, your diet is an important way you can control what your life looks like decades from now.
That’s why it’s so important — no matter how old you are — to cut back on foods with minimal nutritional value in favor of foods that are good for your heart. Isatu Isuk, R.D., L.D.N., a dietitian at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, suggests five simple adjustments you can make to help boost your heart health.
1. Choose nuts over chips.
Sometimes your craving for a salty, crunchy snack is too strong to ignore. But that bag of chips is high in sodium and often contains unhealthy fats (saturated fat and trans fat), contributing to the buildup of plaque on the inner walls of your arteries and increasing your risk of coronary heart disease. Also, refined carbohydrates found in chips can spike your blood sugar.
Excerpted from Johns Hopkins Medicine
