Listen in or read from the partial transcript below as Jammie Menetrey, DO, Cardiology provider at Skagit Regional Health discusses how to best feed your heart and keep it healthy. 

Amanda Wilde (Host) Food do we eat to live or do we live to eat today? We'll talk about food and heart health with Dr. Jamie cardiologist at Skagit Regional Health. Welcome to Be Well, the podcast from Skagit Regional Health. I'm Amanda Wilde. Dr. Menetrey, great to have you here. Heart disease is the number one cause of death worldwide. So how much difference can your diet make in regards to your heart health?

Jammie Menetrey, DO: I think that the diet can make a huge difference, not only in preventing heart disease but also treating it and possibly even reversing it.

Amanda Wilde (Host): Wow. So, how does that work? What foods are we turning to best improve heart health?

Dr. Menetrey: Really it's a plant-based whole food diet, which means anything that has a face or came from something that had a face, you probably don't want to eat it. You want to eat more vegetables. You want to eat more fruits, whole grains and legumes, which are peas, beans and lentils.

Amanda Wilde (Host): So those are the foods we should turn toward. What foods should we try to avoid?

Dr. Menetrey: We really should try to avoid foods that are overly processed. Things that don't look like it was just picked off the tree or pulled out of the ground. Something that's highly refined, such as refined grains that have been milled to the point where we removed all the good fiber and the iron and the vitamins.

They've been puffed or flaked, or degermed. Those are the types of grains that we want to avoid. We want to avoid refined sugars, including sugar sweetened beverages. We really want to try to minimize salty foods. Things that come in cans, that are packaged in bags and boxes, generally those are preserved with salt. So we really want to try to minimize that. We want to eat the foods that are provided freshly from the earth, that have the least amount of processing to them.

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