Fight heart disease with a healthy diet

Diet has a major impact on heart health. Here are some tips for creating a diet that will protect your heart against disease.

"Good" fats are also good for your heart. Swapping that cheeseburger for seafood or that butter for peanut butter (a good source of unsaturated fat) lowers your "bad" LDL cholesterol while leaving "good" HDL cholesterol alone.

• In fact, eating just a handful of nuts a few times a week can slash your risk of getting heart disease by 25 percent.
• So can eating fish a few times a week. Seafood contains omega-3 fatty acids, which do a world of good for your heart by lowering triglycerides, helping prevent blood clots, reducing inflammation and promoting normal heart rhythm. Eating just two servings of fish — especially fatty fish such as salmon or mackerel — a week can reduce your risk of heart disease by a third or more.

Notice that we've talked about nuts, oils and fish instead of other fat sources such as burgers or butter. It's true that adding fat lowers the GL of a starchy food, but adding butter or sour cream to a heap of mashed potatoes doesn't make it healthy. Quite the contrary.

• Butter, which comes from cow's milk, is an animal food, and as with many animal foods, most of the fat it contains is saturated. That's the kind that clogs arteries. It's also bad for blood sugar.
• In both animal and human studies, a diet high in saturated fat has been shown to trigger insulin resistance, which it does in many ways.
• Saturated fat increases inflammation, which is toxic to cells, including those that handle glucose. It also makes cell membranes less fluid, so the insulin receptors there are less responsive to insulin; the hormone bounces off them like water off a drum rather than sticking to them.
• A moderate-fat diet can be every bit as effective as a low-fat diet in helping you lose weight.
• It's clear that people who eat the most saturated fat are at the highest risk of developing insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, conditions that increase your risk of heart disease and diabetes.
• The trick, then, is to avoid the worst of the "bad" fat foods, like marbled steak, high-fat lunchmeats, butter, whole milk, full-fat cheeses and ice cream, and choose instead lean cuts of meat and poultry, fat-free or one percent milk, low-fat cheese and lean lunchmeats such as turkey, chicken and extra-lean roast beef.

Even better, embrace unsaturated fats, which can actually improve insulin sensitivity, thus benefitting your blood sugar.

• These fats come mainly from plants — think avocados, nuts and seeds, olives, olive and canola oil — and fish and seafood.
• The Mediterranean diet, one of the healthiest diets in the world, gets a moderately high 30 to 35 percent of its calories from fat, mostly the unsaturated kind. This is the fat ceiling we recommend.