Diet and Fitness: A Proven Path to Heart Health

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He also recommends eating fish twice a week and choosing from a variety of fish, including tuna, cod and salmon; keeping red meat consumption to a minimum; and eliminating trans fats. Smokers must give up cigarettes to cut their risk for heart disease, too.

And even moderate amounts of exercise can make a difference in a person's body mass index, a ratio of weight to height that is useful in assessing whether a person is at a healthy weight.

"Building physical activity into our daily lives is essential for good health, and there are thousands of ways to do this," Willett noted.

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Yet, while a healthy diet-and-exercise regimen may be a potent antidote in the war against heart disease, many Americans just can't get their nutritional and physical fitness acts together.

"Many factors have been barriers," Willett conceded. "Lack of information or incorrect information has been part of the problem," he said. "Unfortunately, many people have been told the most important change was to reduce total fat in the diet, which will be ineffective or even harmful for some people."

Old habits also can impede change.

How people eat and exercise become mostly ingrained by adulthood, explained Karen Chapman-Novakofski, an associate professor of nutrition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "So, the first part of it is to really raise awareness of what people are eating, how they're living, how they're exercising, because if they don't recognize that, then you can't hope that they're going to change," she explained.

The second part, she added, is planning ahead.

"One of the things that I tell audiences when I'm talking about obesity and diabetes is you have to have a plan. I don't like to use the word 'diet' because that sounds restrictive," Chapman-Novakofski said. "But having a plan for what you're going to eat, when you're going to exercise, that's reasonable, that you can really do, and means you're much more likely to accomplish that then if you unconsciously complete your dietary habits and exercise habits and hope it was right."

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