Eating healthy is a lifeline for cardiac patients – here’s how to stick to a diet

Cardiovascular disease remains a leading cause of death worldwide, and managing it effectively requires more than just medical intervention: what you eat plays a crucial role in your heart’s health.

For cardiac patients, following nutritional recommendations isn’t just a suggestion; it’s a lifeline. A heart-healthy diet can help control risk factors like high blood pressure, cholesterol levels and obesity, all of which are key contributors to heart disease.

A healthy diet will help you prevent new heart problems, which is called secondary prevention, and it will help improve functional capacity and quality of life, giving you more independence for daily activities. But for many patients, adhering to these dietary guidelines can be a significant challenge even while they are in a cardiac rehabilitation program. This is especially challenging for those who live in low-resourced settings (areas or communities with few resources and little support for health and wellness).

Cardiac rehab is an interdisciplinary approach focused on interventions for secondary prevention and improving cardiovascular prognosis, to reduce the global impact of cardiovascular disease. We recently conducted a study aimed at understanding the barriers and facilitators that low-resourced patients face when trying to follow nutritional recommendations in cardiac rehab.

The findings underscore how critical, yet complex, it is for patients to maintain a heart-healthy diet. The results...

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