The Number 1 Thing A Cardiologist Recommends You Avoid Eating For A Healthy Heart

Everyone seems to have an opinion about how to get — and keep — our hearts healthy. General Mills wants us to eat Cheerios. TikTok says we should go raw vegan. And our trainer wants us to do 10 more burpees.

The reality is it takes a host of behaviors and practices to protect our hearts from harm — and our genetics and family history play a huge role in how our tickers function, too.

But Big Cereal is onto something because diet is definitely an important factor in maintaining sound cardiac health. Eating lots of vegetables and fruits, whole grains, healthy lean protein and unsaturated fats can reduce your chances of accumulating plaque in your coronary arteries.

And, yes, plaque in your heart is as unsavory as it sounds — and dangerous.

So, if a diverse diet full of nutrient-rich foods is what we’re aiming for, what should we stay away from?

This is what we, Noah Michelson and Raj Punjabi, hosts of HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast, asked Dr. Guilly Rebagay, a cardiologist and assistant professor of medicine at New York University Langone.

Press play to hear the full episode:

Dr. Rebagay said the number one thing he’d advise his patients to avoid is anything with trans fats, adding that foods high in “very saturated fats, very oily things ― you know, like foods prepared with duck fat ― or [heavily processed] things you see on grocery store shelves” can spell trouble for our hearts.

That’s because these types of foods can contribute to the production of LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, which in turn creates that artery-clogging plaqueand causes trouble-making inflammation.

“Sometimes in the supermarket next to the oils, you see big cans of fat,” he noted. “They’re rendered for very delicious meals ― but I can