Week 5: Eating a healthy diet
Everybody should be trying to eat a healthy, balanced diet to help lower their risk of heart and circulatory diseases. When you’re living with high cholesterol, this is especially important. Eating well will reduce your risk of a heart attack or stroke, as well as reduce your chances of developing other risk factors like Type 2 diabetes.
This week we’ll cover healthy eating, introduce the benefits of a Mediterranean diet and how you can start making changes.
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What is a Mediterranean diet?
A Mediterranean diet isn’t a fad diet. It’s a way of eating that includes plenty of fruit and vegetables, wholegrain cereals, fish (both white and oily), and small amounts of lean meat and low-fat dairy. It also includes healthy fats like olive oil and rapeseed oil rather than butter.
The health benefits of the Mediterranean diet are not down to any single food, but come from eating the diet as a whole.
Research shows that people who eat this way have a lower risk of heart and circulatory diseases.
Make your meals more Mediterranean
You can enjoy many of your favourite foods and meals while eating a Mediterranean diet. Often it just takes a few simple swaps.
Use our Mediterranean meal swapper to find out what swaps you can make to bring the benefits of healthy foods into your everyday routine.
![Minestrone soup](https://images.hu-production.be/programs/lower-your-cholesterol/W05B03a.jpg)
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