What Your Heart Wants You to Eat

If you were ever told to eat your veggies, that was good advice. But you don’t have to overhaul your diet completely. A URI nutrition professor says to start by making one small change.

For years, nutritionists and organizations like the American Heart Association have offered fairly consistent guidance on what constitutes a healthy diet for cardiovascular health and overall nutrition. In spite of the consistent advice, most Americans’ diets fall short of the ideal.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Healthy Eating Index, a measure of how well Americans’ diets align with guidelines, gives us a failing grade—58 out of 100. Clearly, changes are needed, but URI associate professor of nutrition Maya Vadiveloo says diet changes can be difficult for people.

Vadiveloo, who is also chair of the AHA’s Lifestyle Nutrition Committee, says, “Diet is the number one risk factor for leading causes of death and disability. We need to do something about diet, because changing it can prevent heart disease. After people have developed heart disease, treatment is more difficult and more expensive.”

Vadiveloo offers some advice on how to eat for heart health.

Is there an ideal diet, or does it vary by person?
There’s some variability, but more consistency: Eat a lot of fruits and vegetables (7–9 servings daily), whole grains, plant protein (like nuts, seeds, and legumes), and heart-healthy oils. Reduce intake of highly processed food, especially those high in added sugar, salt, and saturated fat. Those principles underlie a healthy diet pattern for the average person. Among popular diets, the Mediterranean and DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diets tend to align with those principles.

What are some of the obstacles to achieving an ideal diet?
There are many obstacles. Eating more fruits and vegetables sounds simple, but things get in the way, whether it’s cost, availability, or how quickly fresh foods spoil. Processed foods—high in salt, sugar, and refined grains, not nutritionally balanced—are inexpensive, portable, and engineered to be consistently tasty, so they’re an easy choice. And if we make that choice often, our palate adjusts, and things like bitter-tasting vegetables are less appealing.

What’s one thing people can do today to improve their diets?
Try making one small change and see how long you can stick with it. Add a piece of fruit at breakfast, a vegetable at lunch, or incorporate one of those as a snack. Focus first on what you can add, not on what you should take away. If you pair a less healthy snack, like chips, with a piece of fruit and some nuts, you may find that you feel full and eat fewer chips over time. You can slowly move toward a healthier pattern, and you may feel better, too. So, you’re naturally shifting, as opposed to being in a restrictive mindset. The goal with heart health and dietary changes is for them to be sustainable and permanent. It’s not a quick fix.

—Interview by Patrick Luce ’99

PHOTOS: SETH JACOBSON