Cleveland Clinic Heart Center - Cleveland Clinic Healthy Heart Lifestyle Guide and Cookbook: Featuring more than 150 tempting recipes

Every day I meet people who ask my advice on a heart-healthy diet and lifestyle. This is strange. A great deal of information is already available. The Internet is ful of it. Books about diet and exercise regularly climb the bestseller lists. What are people looking for that theyre not getting from the lifestyle guides already out there? Ill tell you: authority. They want advice that rings true, from experts who not only talk the talk but also walk the walk. If this is what youre looking for, youve come to the right place. The Cleveland Clinic Healthy Heart Lifestyle Guide and Cookbook is the most authoritative guide to heart-healthy living youll ever experience.

This book is based on the knowledge, research, and expertise of Americas number one heart center-the heart experts to whom other heart experts go for the latest breakthroughs and advice. It distills the knowledge derived from seeing millions of patients, analyzing mountains of data, and performing groundbreaking research on every aspect of the heart and its care. The result is here, in a form that youll find easy and fun to understand and use.

What will you get from these pages? Youll find the right foods to eat, the body weight thats best for you, and the exercise program you need to live a long and happy life. Youll see how stress reduction works, learn what smoking is doing to you (and how to quit), and get straight talk on alcohol-is it good for your heart or not?

How did we arrive at this priceless information? We looked for evidence. Not anecdotes. We laid out the hard facts that have been established by large-scale randomized trials. We looked at epidemiologic studies of whole populations. We combined that evidence with everything we know about the basic science of the heart and vascular disease models.

Some of what youll read here is common knowledge. Some of it is the emerging wisdom of our medical specialty. Some of it is so new it will astound you.

Look at what weve learned about body fat. We all know it puts you at increased risk for coronary disease. But did you know that how much fat you carry may be less important than where you carry it? For instance, people who carry excess fat on the abdomen are at greater risk of developing heart disease than people who carry excess fat mainly on their hips and buttocks. The Cleveland Clinic Healthy Heart Lifestyle Guide and Cookbook gives you strategies to not only combat overall body weight but specifically target the danger belt between hips and ribs.

Then theres fiber. It has no nutritional value, vitamins, or minerals, and your body cant digest it to use for energy. Yet, if every American doubled his or her fiber intake, it would have a dramatic effect on heart disease and diabetes. A diet rich in certain forms of fiber can reduce bad cholesterol, lower your body weight, help control your blood sugar, and increase your intake of vitamins and minerals. Dietary fiber and the foods that contain it appear to be one of our strongest allies in the fight against heart disease.

The Cleveland Clinic Healthy Heart Lifestyle Guide and Cookbook advises you to eat whole fruits, vegetables, grains, and legumes rich in plant fiber and complementary nutrients that protect your heart. These foods are at the heart of the Mediterranean diet-the only nutritional plan thats been proven to protect the heart, promote longevity, and lower the risk of debilitating disease. The Cleveland Clinic Healthy Heart Lifestyle Guide and Cookbook weaves these mouthwatering foods into delicious recipes, snack tips, and easy-to-follow guidelines that you can incorporate into your lifestyle now, without traveling to Greece or southern Italy.

Lifestyle is the key here. A lifestyle that combines a Mediterranean diet, fiber, fruits, vegetables and whole grains, weight loss, relaxation, exercise, and tobacco avoidance can lower blood pressure, bad cholesterol, blood sugar, and insulin. These, in turn, affect what we now know is the underlying cause of coronary artery disease: inflammation.

Why is inflammation important? It has to do with some other big news not everyone has gotten. Our knowledge of coronary artery disease has undergone a revolution in recent years. Back in the 1990s, I had the privilege of helping to develop a new cardiac-imaging modality called intravascular ultrasound, or IVUS. What we saw using IVUS startled us. We saw pockets of fatty cholesterol built up inside the walls of the coronary arteries. These pockets of fat-or plaques-were hidden away from conventional imaging. We learned that these hidden plaques could become inflamed, and when inflamed, they could burst. And when they burst, they attracted blood clots that could plug the coronary artery. We learned that these sudden events-transpiring over the course of only a few seconds-were what caused most heart attacks, not the gradual narrowing of the coronary arteries taking place over the course of weeks or months, as was previously be-lieved.

Thats why inflammation is dangerous, and why anything that reduces inflammation is good. So what causes inflammation in the coronary arteries? Smoking. High blood pressure. Diabetes. Obesity. Genetic factors. Fortunately, all of these factors (except the last) are largely under our control. This book will show you how to control them, and how to get your heart pumping and your life moving!

Let me introduce you to the incredible team of Cleveland Clinic experts who will be your guides in the chapters to come. Melissa Ohlson, M.S., R.D., L.D., is the coordinator of the Preventive Cardiology and Rehabilitation Program at Americas number one heart center. Her passion for cardiac health is only matched by her love of good food, and her deep understanding of the practical realities of the kitchen. Our exercise advisor Gordon Blackburn, Ph.D., is an expert in not only the physiology of exercise but the psychology of exercise. He knows how to motivate you! My outstanding colleague in Cardiovascular Medicine, Michael Lauer, M.D., is the complete expert on heart disease risk factors and a leading researcher in the field. When it comes to stress reduction and smoking cessation, few experts can match the experience of George Tesar, M.D., Michael McKee, Ph.D., and Amy Windover, Ph.D., all from Cleveland Clinics Department of Psychiatry and Psychology

But this book would be nothing without its unbelievably delicious recipes. Frances Giedt and Bonnie Sanders Polin will totally erase any negative ideas you might have had about heart-healthy eating. If your local restaurant served these dishes, it would have a four-star rating, the chef would have his own TV show, and thered be lines of people stretching around the block waiting to get in. The food is