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In simplest terms, what you put into your body affects your heart directly. Nutrition plays a direct role on your cardiovascular health, hence it is super important to keep tabs on your regular diet to avoid health complications in the future and maintaining a healthy heart for as long as you live.

If you eat too much of what your body doesn’t need, it stays in your body, travels through the blood, and starts clogging up blood vessels. What clogs your blood vessels is called plaque, a gooey substance that will stick to your artery walls.

As this plaque — made up of cholesterol and other wastes — sticks to the artery walls, it makes the artery smaller, slowing the flow of blood, which carries oxygen, into the heart, brain, and other vital organs.

A heart-healthy diet improves your cardiovascular health in many ways, from helping keep you trim, thereby reducing strain on your heart and arteries, to keeping cholesterol down and preventing it from blocking those arteries.

Regular physical activity can help you maintain your weight, keep off weight that you lose and help you reach physical and cardiovascular fitness. If it’s hard to schedule regular exercise sessions, try aiming for sessions of at last 10 minutes spread throughout the week.

You may be eating plenty of food, but your body may not be getting the nutrients it needs to be healthy. Nutrient-rich foods have minerals, protein, whole grains and other nutrients but are lower in calories. They may help you control your weight, cholesterol and blood pressure.

Eat an overall healthy dietary pattern that emphasizes:

• a variety of fruits and vegetables,
• whole grains,
• low-fat dairy products,
• skinless poultry and fish
• nuts and legumes
• non-tropical vegetable oils

Limit your intake of saturated fat, trans fat, sodium, red meat, sweets and sugar-sweetened beverages. If you choose to eat red meat, compare labels and select the leanest cuts available. Replace saturated fats with better fats, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated.

If you need to lower your blood cholesterol, reduce saturated fat to no more than 5 to 6 percent of total calories. For someone eating 2,000 calories a day, that’s about 13 grams of saturated fat. Choose foods with less sodium and prepare foods with little or no salt.

To lower blood pressure, aim to eat no more than 2,400 milligrams of sodium per day. Reducing daily intake to 1,500 mg is desirable because it can lower blood pressure even further.

If you can’t meet these goals right now, even reducing sodium intake by 1,000 mg per day can benefit blood pressure.

These precautionary steps will ensure you have a healthy heart and a healthy life head.