According to health authorities, there is a cheap and easily accessible snack food that can help you live a long and happy life as a result of lowered heart disease risk. In fact, consuming a small handful of them on a daily basis is enough to keep your ticker and the rest of your cardiovascular system out of harm’s way.
Want to know which snack food it is? Then keep on reading this article.
Feel free to share this on your social media sites afterwards so that your family and friends, in particular health-conscious ones, may also learn the fact that keeping their heart in top-top shape is as easy as snacking healthily.
So what are those snack foods that you should go nuts on in order to have your heart disease risk lowered significantly? They’re none other than nuts!
Unless you are allergic to nuts, consuming them on a regular basis can keep heart-related problems from striking, say health authorities. Just about any nut that you can get your hands on is good for the cardiovascular system, although studies say that some appear to have more heart-friendly perks than the rest, and they include almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, pecans and macadamia nuts.
But it’s okay to snack on any other nut. It’s for the fact that all nuts are phenomenal sources of omega-3 fatty acids — healthy types of fats that are revered for their cardioprotective abilities. And by the way, omega-3 fatty acids are also good for the eyes, joints and brain.
Vegetarians in particular can benefit tremendously from the addition of nuts to the diet on a regular basis. That’s because some of the leading sources of those beneficial fats are oily types of fish like salmon, mackerel, trout and tuna — all of which they cannot consume. Aside from nuts, vegetarians may also obtain good amounts of omega-3 fatty acids from seeds like flax, chia, pumpkin and sesame, and also healthy plant oils such as olive oil, canola oil and soybean oil.
However, it’s not just the presence of loads of omega-3 fatty acids that make the consumption of nuts very good for keeping at bay heart disease which is, by the way, touted by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the number one killer in the US and elsewhere on the planet.
Nuts are packed with dietary fiber, which is something that helps in lowering the levels of bad cholesterol in the bloodstream. There are many risk factors for deadly heart disease, and one of them is high bad cholesterol levels. Also helping to fend off too much bad cholesterol are plant sterols in nuts.
Scientists also credit vitamin E in nuts for safeguarding the ticker. The said vitamin exhibits the ability to prevent or slow down the accumulation of plaque on the arterial walls. It’s not a good idea to have your arteries clogged with plaque as it can lead to angina, heart attack and stroke.
Just like what’s mentioned earlier, health authorities suggest the consumption of a small handful of nuts — same type or different ones — on a daily basis. Unfortunately, regularly snacking on nuts alone won’t do the trick.
If you really want to lower your risk of suffering from heart disease, your everyday nut consumption should be paired with healthy eating, the kind in which every meal includes fresh fruits and vegetables. It’s also important to considerably limit your consumption of foods that are loaded with sugar, saturated fat and cholesterol.
Getting your regular dose of exercise is important, too. The same is true with getting rid of excess pounds, quitting cigarette smoking, consuming alcohol in moderation, and keeping your stress levels to a minimum.
