HEARThrive - Module 2 - Optimize Your Diet For Heart Health
You Can Reduce Your Heart Disease Risk With A Proper Diet
What you will learn
Ultimately, the student will make his or her own dietary choices, but they will do so with confidence backed by knowledge.
You will be able to readily distinguish the difference between healthy foods and manufactured products that are called food, but they really aren't.
You will be able to have intelligent conversations with people about their individual dietary choices, without getting defensive or offensive.
Social events may put you in a challenging position with tempting but unhealthy food choices. You'll now be able to strategically manage these situations.
You'll know the best blood tests to request from your doctor (including fasting insulin, triglycerides, HDL, HbA1c) to assess whether your diet is healthy.
You'll be able to quickly evaluate food labels in your mind and make wiser food choices by thinking of sugar in terms of teaspoons rather than grams.
By using a food logging app you'll be able to calculate your carbs, protein and fat and evaluate your food choices and create new, healthy eating plans.
On packaged foods there are two labels: 1) a list of ingredients, and 2) nutrition facts. You'll look there and be able to decide quickly if it's a good choice.
Using a glucometer, you'll be able to test your own glucose response to any food to see how much your blood sugar rises after eating it.
You can research and source your food choices in person by speaking with vendors at farmers' markets or visiting actual farms yourself.
From now on you will know how to evaluate a mainstream diet-related news story and recognize whether or not it has merit.
For metabolic health and weight loss, you can experiment with time-restricted eating, i.e. eating during a relatively short time period and fasting in between.
Why take this course?
Could your diet truly make a difference in preventing heart disease? Absolutely! Learn what to do in HEARThrive Module 2. The magic of a heart healthy diet largely involves keeping your blood sugar under control. Blood sugar responds to the foods that you eat. To avoid big increases in blood glucose after a meal or snack you must pay attention to your food choices. Avoiding sugar in candies, soda pop and desserts is an obvious starting point. But many other foods are high in carbohydrates, especially wheat flour, and these pose problems as well because the carbs get converted into sugar. Another big health hazard with food is hydrogenated oil and high Omega-6 seed oils used in many processed foods. Food sends information within your body that affects many aspects of your health. Dr. Mark Hyman explains that food "speaks" to your genes, your hormones, your immune system and microbiome, your mitochondria, your brain chemistry and more. We'll be covering these topics in last four modules of HEARThrive. For now, you can get a big head start by choosing "real" food. By that I mean simple, quality food versus processed multi-ingredient and chemically adulterated processed food. Like most people, I did almost everything wrong, and sure enough I needed triple bypass surgery at age 66. My twin brother underwent a quadruple bypass at age 58. Your fate is in your hands and will be strongly influenced by your diet. When you apply what you learn in HEARThrive Module 2 on DIET you will learn how to lower your risk and/or avoid getting heart disease.