Discover the pleasures of healthy eating

Your eating habits influence your risk of cardiovascular disease, along with obesity, high cholesterol and high blood sugar. If you receive conflicting information about how to eat healthy, all your answers are here.

• Don't be put off by the thought that you need to change everything. There are enjoyable and simple ways to enhance your diet without self-sacrifice.
• Eating fresh, natural foods that are full of flavour will encourage you to develop a totally new eating pattern.
• Building up your diet in stages will make change easier and help you to adopt eating habits that will benefit your long-term health.

• North Americans are getting fatter. Part of the reason is that many of us tend to make poor choices — eating processed foods that are high in sugar, refined carbohydrates, salt and unhealthy fats.
• These also tend to be laden with calories which, for anyone with an inactive lifestyle, are hard to burn off.
• This spells trouble for our health because it prompts the body to make too much "bad" LDL cholesterol, which, together with other factors such as inflammation, leads to the formation of artery-clogging plaque.

The processed problem:

• During the past 50 years, more and more of us have come to depend heavily on premade foods and take-out.
• A scan of the food aisles in any supermarket will reveal how many common items are far from pure and natural.
• Most are either processed or artificially sweetened, flavoured or coloured, or laced with chemical preservatives to keep them from spoiling. And it is worth remembering that, when fresh, raw whole foods are canned, precooked or turned into microwavable meals, many essential vitamins, minerals and nutrients are lost.
• An active lifestyle is undoubtedly beneficial to health, but if you want to keep your body in peak condition in the years to come, you will need to give it the right sort of fuel.
• So it really is in your own interests to find out about foods that will protect your heart and arteries, foods that will help to build and maintain your bones and muscles, and foods that will help to keep your weight down as you get older — and adapt your long-term diet accordingly.