Eating for a healthy heart does not mean following the diet your sister-in-law raves about. Her diet may not help you lose weight or help you get the nutrients you need. For you, it may not be a healthy path. Eating for a healthy heart is an individual journey based on your food preferences, daily routines, and your individual health profile. Each of us has different tastes, risks, and lifestyle preferences. So how do you find your own path to heart healthy eating?

Start by recognizing that the heart healthiest eating styles are plant-based. Next, ask the right questions. Whether you should be following a low-fat or a low carbohydrate or a high protein diet is categorically the wrong question. Following one of these diets rather than focusing on heart healthy nutrition that fits your personal preferences and lifestyle may result in heart harmful eating. Asking about the quickest way to lose weight can be just as counterproductive. So what are the right questions? By uncovering the right questions, you will discover which issues need to be addressed first to most effectively advance your health, today and over time.

• How does food and nutrition help or harm my heart and arteries?
• How can nutrition affect my key risk factors such as inflammation, diabetes and metabolic syndrome and help me maintain healthy cholesterol levels and normal blood pressure?
• What are my risk factors? Do I have a family history of heart disease? Do I already have heart disease? Do I have high blood pressure, diabetes, or are my cholesterol numbers too high?

By answering these questions, you begin your journey -- focusing on changing the eating patterns that are most critical for your unique health risks. It is has taken years to define your preferences and establish cravings for specific foods, so it will take time to reprogram your tastes. With your knowledge of the power of nutrition and an understanding of your personal risks, you can continue this journey. And in time, you will find yourself preferring the better-for-you foods which are rich in heart healthy nutrients.

If you are highly motivated to optimize your heart and circulatory health, you might want to adopt a more restricted plant-based diet. If you already have been diagnosed with heart disease, this approach also may be very beneficial, supporting cholesterol reduction, normal blood pressure, and healthier blood sugar levels.

However, many of us want a more mixed diet providing greater freedom to partake in a greater variety of foods. We want to enjoy nuts, seeds, avocados, and olives. We want the benefits gained by cooking with healthier vegetable oils such as extra virgin olive oil, which can dramatically enhance the taste of recipes. While high in calories, these foods are still rich in heart healthy nutrients.

In our mixed diet, we want meat and sweets as well. Some meat, fish and shellfish, eggs, dairy, and some sugars and sweet syrups can also be added to healthy, delicious eating. But with the increased calorie density in these foods, you’ll need to control how much you eat. These foods also introduce heart harmful compounds while delivering lower levels of the heart helpful nutrients. Yet -- they remarkably expand culinary options and substantially increase enjoyment.

Is this mixed diet still a heart healthy diet? Actually, it embodies the definition of the Mediterranean diet. It follows the heart healthy standards defined by the National Institutes of Health National Cholesterol Education Program and the American Heart Association.

Research has shown a substantially lower risk for heart disease in individuals who maintain this style of eating for many years. This eating style reduces the risks of heart attacks and strokes even for those with known heart disease.

The challenge is that the gates are now open. Under the restrictive plant-based diet, the standards of what should be eaten are clear: eat only fruits, vegetables, beans and grains, and perhaps some nuts and seeds.

Under the mixed diet, however, the standards are less defined. You now need to think about avoiding simple carbohydrates that cause a rush of sugar into the bloodstream. You’ll also have to consider limiting the calorie-rich fats that can increase cholesterol and contribute to weight gain, and become more conscious of the risks of excessive salt intake, a major factor causing high blood pressure. You must take into account whether you are getting sufficient amounts of helpful nutrients.

Between these many decisions and your hectic lifestyle, you may lose your nutritional balance, elevating risks for heart disease. The level of calorie-rich, heart harmful foods may now dominate. The levels of helpful foods delivering the necessary nutrients may have fallen by the wayside.

The Kardea approach guides you along a “smart and delicious” path for a healthy heart. Unlike so many diets, it is not a “program” where you start, lose some pounds, and then stop. Rather, it is a philosophy of eating that keeps deliciousness, risks, and science in balance as you journey toward heart healthy eating.

Armed with the science for the nutrients that help and the foods that harm, you can make more informed choices based on your personal risk profile and your motivation.