Your Diet and Heart Health: Getting Results

In the quest for a healthy heart, lower blood pressure and low cholesterol, you’ve committed to eating right, exercising, and maintaining your weight.

Maybe you’re also adding known heart-helpers to your diet, like omega-3-rich foods, fiber, and plant sterols.

What you want to know is two things: When will you see results, and what kind of results will you see?

Heart Healthy Results: What Kind?

First, it’s important to know that multiple lifestyle changes are vital for healthier living.  Steps like a balanced diet, physical activity, weight maintenance, and stress reduction work cooperatively, and have an accumulative effect. One change may make a small difference, but many little changes add up to significant results.

What sort of results? The answers depend on the heart-healthy changes you make and on your own unique makeup.

• Following the DASH diet: eating more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low fat dairy foods, especially foods rich in potassium, magnesium, and calcium. Eating less red meat, sweets, and saturated fat. Reducing daily sodium to 1,600 mg.
  Look for an 8 to 14 point reduction in blood pressure. 
• Following the TLC diet for people with high cholesterol: reducing saturated fat to 7% of calories, reducing dietary cholesterol to less than 200 mg a day, and adding 2 grams of plant sterols/stanols and 5 to 10 more grams of fiber to daily diet.Look for a 20% or greater reduction in LDL “bad” cholesterol.
• Weight loss (with a BMI of 18.5 - 24.9). Expect to see a 5 to 20 point reduction in blood pressure. Look for a 5% to 8% drop in LDL cholesterol.
• Exercise (30 minutes of physical activity 5 or more days a week). Expect a 2 to 8 point reduction in blood pressure. Look for LDL (bad) cholesterol to go down, and HDL (good) to go up.
• Stress reduction (using biofeedback, relaxation, etc). Look for a 3 to 5 point blood pressure reduction. No drop in cholesterol. Improved sleep and possibly some weight loss.  

The long-term heart health benefits from these lifestyle changes are huge. Controlling your blood pressure alone can reduce your risk of a heart attack by 20% to 25%, lower your risk of stroke by 35% to 40%, and cut your risk of heart failure by 50%. 

Heart Healthy Results: When?

How long will immediate reductions in blood pressure and total cholesterol take? Give yourself at least three months to see results, though you may see changes as quickly as three to four weeks.

Three months is a good rule of thumb, however, as most physicians will suggest you wait at least that long before getting new lab work.

Better Heart Health: Questions to Ask Your Doctor

One key in successfully lowering cholesterol and high blood pressure is to work closely with your doctor. After you’ve made the heart-healthy lifestyle changes necessary, questions you might want to ask your doctor at the next checkup include:

• What are my target blood pressure and cholesterol levels? 
• How close am I to my target blood pressure and cholesterol levels? 
• What should I do if the results aren’t what I expected? 
• Can a referral to a dietitian help me meet my goals? 
• Can I reach my blood pressure and cholesterol goals with lifestyle changes alone? 
• Should I have blood work to check for gaps in my diet, like vitamin D and calcium? 
• With my current diet and exercise level can I reasonably expect to reach my cholesterol and blood pressure goals? 
• At what point will we consider medications to help control my blood pressure or cholesterol? 
• After reaching my target goals will I be able to stop medications? 
• When should I have my next check-up?