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Diet is a powerful tool in heart disease prevention
source:Local12 2022-03-23 [Health]
A local woman says a change in her diet made a big difference in her future health.

You don’t usually think of a change in diet as a breakthrough in medicine, but interventional cardiologists at The Christ Hospital Heart and Vascular Institute say we need to think of food as medicine. That’s because what’s on the menu can drive up numbers directly linked to heart disease.

Latha Samu says she made some major changes to try and turn around her own family history. She says she grew up in the South Asian culture where most people were vegetarians.

“I’m a vegetarian also, but then my food was mostly a lot of rice with a little bit of vegetables,” said Samu.

By swapping that around, she saw her risks for heart disease improve:

“The diet tends to be based on South Asian diet,” said Dr. Santosh Menon, a cardiologist at The Christ Hospital. “The diet is a link to our culture. We all eat it, but it’s not healthy.”

Dr. Menon says if you’re South Asian, you’re at higher risk for heart disease based on many of these lifestyle and diet choices, but many don’t know it.

“I think a lot of people that I have seen that have had heart attacks at an early age usually have a family history of heart attacks, but it never clicks on them to get checked out,” said Dr. Menon.

Getting your cholesterol and other labs checked for risks before and after a change in your diet can show you that, sometimes, what’s in the produce aisle can be just as powerful as what’s at the pharmacy.

“See a cardiologist and get some more tests done so he can assess your risk and go from there,” said Samu.

If you would like more information, Local 12 invites you to join us Saturday, March 26 at 11:30 a.m. for "Breakthroughs in Heart Medicine." It airs on Star64. It’s a half-hour special with some life-changing heart stories and new research you may not know about.