Have kids they said. Along with all the vomit and tears they will bring you joy, hilarity and fierce amounts of love (true, true.) But nobody ever mentioned they might concoct a “potion” that sits fermenting in an overlooked Thermos for four days. Oh and that it might detonate in the kitchen in the dead of night. Have you ever cleaned out your toaster with a cotton swab? Because I have. It’s hard! Especially when you should really be in bed and your heart is still somewhere outside your chest cavity.

A few days previously I’d given the girls some random kitchen and craft ingredients to make their own potions — magic medicine to cure their baby dolls apparently. A serious business if the expressions on their little faces were anything to go by! And so I let them mix away while I cleaned the kitchen (oh the irony.) Once they were finished they insisted on pouring the concoctions into their Thermos flasks. Chloe’s went in the fridge where I later retrieved it and washed it out — I still look back at that moment with a sigh of relief. I am not sure it would have suffered the same fate as the other one, but rinsing off a week’s worth of groceries is not high on my “to do” list.

Belle’s on the other hand, sat on the side, hidden behind a box of cereal. And (don’t try this at home) it turns out that the combination of flour, sugar, oats, finger paint, salt and 70 degree weather isn’t a good one. I am not sure how to describe it really. Exploding porridge perhaps? As loud as a gunshot. Or a small bomb. Not very relaxing as it turns out.

The next morning, with my heart finally back in its usual rhythm, I did see the silver lining. I might have aged a few years but “at least I’ll get a good column out of this” I thought. February is heart month and I’ve been wanting to pass on some heart-healthy tips for a while. The last one, “don’t sweat the small stuff” couldn’t be more important. Even if the “small stuff” is all over your kitchen cabinets and dripping off the ceiling.

When it comes to nutrition and heart health it would be easy to give you the same old same old. Eat more fruit and vegetables, lots of wholegrains and include oily fish. But the truth is that while many of the traditional guidelines are still valid, the tables have turned a bit recently. It’s become obvious that the “low-fat” monopoly of the last few decades just isn’t working. Here’s why, and what to focus on now.

Rethinking nutrition and heart health — Seven top tips!

1. Start thinking about sugar

Wait a minute, isn’t heart health all about fat and cholesterol? Not really. The low-fat diet philosophy pushed so heavily through government guidelines over the last 40 years hasn’t really got us anywhere. Deaths from heart disease top the charts in Western cultures and the number of people living with chronic, debilitating and expensive symptoms just keeps rising. Where did we go wrong? By branding all fats as bad fats and by ignoring the role of processed food — especially refined sugars. The reality is that good fats (especially the Omega 3s) help to nurture heart health (e.g. by reducing blood pressure), support healthy metabolism and improve the function of insulin within the body. So ironically, by removing fats from our diets, we paved the way for more problems with obesity and diabetes too. It gets worse. When you remove fat, you remove flavour. Food manufacturers put the flavour back in with extra sugar and salt. So the market became awash with “healthy” low-fat options that were in fact riddled with extra sugar and sodium. Excess sugar results in weight gain (just through a different mechanism) and to top it all off, the food industry began its love affair with High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) — a cheap, genetically modified sweetener that generates more inflammation in the body than regular sugar. The problem isn’t just our total sugar consumption (which has actually begun to level off) it’s that the proportion of sugar we consume from a HFCS source has risen dramatically.

What’s the answer here? To gradually reduce the amount of sugar in your diet, allowing your taste buds time to adjust so that healthy food seems tasty and not bland. Ditch the artificial sweeteners too — they will continue to elevate the expectation of your taste buds (so healthy food will taste bland in comparison) not to mention their carcinogenic associations in laboratory tests. Eat less processed food and more whole, home-cooked food.

2. Reduce inflammation

I mentioned inflammation. The problem is that most of the processed items we have come to view as “food” contain bad fats and processed sugars. These are “inflammatory” and although the ability to trigger inflammation in the body is essential (to prevent the spread of infection for example), it’s bad news if it occurs chronically. Recent studies suggest that inflammation in the arteries is a major cause of atherosclerosis. So we need to focus less on total cholesterol intake (dietary cholesterol intake does not necessarily determine blood levels of cholesterol) and more on ditching the bad Trans/hydrogenated fats. To keep it simple, bad fats occur in processed/fried food and healthy fats (which should be increased) occur naturally in nuts, seeds, olives, oily fish and avocado. Fruit and vegetables are also rich in anti-inflammatory antioxidants so it’s a great idea to get those in too. Focus on low sugar fruits (berries are especially good) and try using brightly pigmented squash and pumpkin in place of potatoes.

A quick note re food sensitivity here. Wholegrains are rich in the fibre that helps to lower blood levels of bad LDL cholesterol. But if eating wheat makes you bloated, then it stops being heart healthy for YOU. In nutritional therapy, chronic exposure to food sensitivities is also understood to contribute to inflammation. Better choices would then be oats, brown rice and quinoa (so long as these don’t cause bloating either.)

3. Eat better quality animal products

You are what you eat, but you are what you eat eats too! Cholesterol is made in the liver, so anything that comes from something that had a liver (whether it is a cow or a shrimp) contains cholesterol. But this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t eat them. The Inuit Eskimo have one of the highest dietary intakes of cholesterol in the world, and one of the lowest expressions of cardiovascular risk factors. The issue lies in the farming practices that bring the food to our table. Meat and poultry production in the US has changed dramatically in the last few decades — antibiotics, growth hormones and genetically modified feed are now the norm, and all of them reach us via the food chain. Eating unhealthy, unfit animals simply doesn’t make sense. Although saturated fats are not the villains they once were (which is why avocado and coconut oil are now back on the list) animal based saturated fats are harder to digest. If they are harder to digest AND carriers of the nasties, should we really be eating them? Instead, choose smaller portions of organic (and preferably grass fed) meat and poultry. Pick organic eggs and dairy too. As always, this means less processed (think chicken patties) and more whole food (e.g. organic chicken breast.) Make the organic option cheaper by diluting casseroles with beans, or filling up with vegetables!

4. Don’t be fooled by labels

This one makes my blood boil. So your chips are cholesterol free? So they damn well should be. It doesn’t mean they are heart healthy! Food manufacturers are using healthy buzzwords galore to try and convince you to buy their products. Potato chips are usually cooked in vegetable oil, so given the point above (that cholesterol is made in the liver) they shouldn’t contain any anyway. You are just being hoodwinked into thinking they are healthy when they are not. Remember fried foods are inflammatory. So again pick less processed options and more wholefood. Use veggie sticks for dip instead of chips. If you really want something crunchy, try the Sea Salt lentil chips by the Mediterranean Food Company (Supermart, Lindos, Miles, Marketplace.)

5. Detox (your mindset)

While I think gently detoxing is a great idea, you can skip the colonic (and breathe a collective sigh of relief!) But whether you detox with hot water and lemon in the morning, or a serving of kale with your evening meal, know this: it’s detoxing your mindset that is most important. By that I mean that it’s essential to see healthy lifestyle steps as positive actions that you are taking towards achieving your goals. If you feel deprived, or have lost your love of food, then your motivation won’t last long! This means putting some effort in to find new foods and recipes that you love. It’s also a good idea to wean yourself off salt and sugar gradually — that way you allow your taste buds to adjust and the flavours of real food come through. Generally speaking, processed food takes you away from your goals whereas wholefood takes you towards them. We have a theme going on here…….

6. Don’t sweat the small stuff

The only “small stuff” items you need to worry about are those tiny but totally incomprehensible ingredients on your food labels. Yet again, avoiding processed food will radically reduce your exposure to long ingredient lists and that is a very good thing! It’s very easy to preach “don’t stress” and I know it’s much harder to do it in practice, but we do have to recognise the connection between our emotional and physical health. Try and take a step back from your life and work on the four D’s: Download (write everything down), ditch (what really doesn’t matter or doesn’t bring you value), delegate (what you can) and deal (with the things you have to.) This technique has helped me enormously over the last few months but if you are having problems navigating your life, try contacting Julia Pitt (The Royal Gazette Success Coach and Columnist) for one to one help. She’s amazing!

7. Stay hydrated

We spend so much time focusing on what we eat that we rarely take a good enough look at what we drink. Water matters and it matters a lot. The primary cause of fatigue (that 3 o’clock low that fuels our caffeine and sugar addition) is dehydration. Sometimes making better choices comes down to something as simple as drinking a glass of water. And consider this too; Loma Linda University in the US studied dehydration and the risk of heart attack and stroke in 20,297 people. They found that compared to people who drank only two glasses of water a day, those who drank at least five cut their risk by between 41 percent and 54 percent. How’s that for motivation?

The advice given in this article is not intended to replace medical advice, but to complement it. Always consult your GP if you have any health concerns. Catherine Burns BA Hons, Dip ION is the Managing Director of Natural Ltd and a fully qualified Nutritional Therapist trained by the Institute for Optimum Nutrition in the UK. Please note that she is not a Registered Dietitian. For details, please go to www.natural.bm or call 236-7511. Join Catherine on Facebook: www.facebook.com/nutrifitan