Niki Bezzant: Tough love best for our hearts

Drink in moderation and eat healthily to reduce the risk of heart disease.

This week 50 women will die from a disease that is, in part, preventable. It's something we tend to associate more with men: heart disease.

We women need to start paying attention to our hearts, because heart disease is our No1 killer. We are five times more likely to die from heart disease than we are from breast cancer.

What's also interesting, and alarming, is that women can have different heart attack symptoms to men and we don't always recognise these. Although crushing chest pain is often a sign, it may not be severe, or even the main symptom.

I was surprised to learn that women often experience jaw, neck, shoulder, back or abdominal discomfort, along with indigestion, nausea or vomiting.

So it's perhaps not surprising that women often delay calling an ambulance when they're having a heart attack and tend to have worse outcomes than men afterwards.

So what do we need to do to protect ourselves? Apart from knowing the signs of trouble, it's good to know our risk factors. You're at greater risk of heart disease if your father or brother has had a heart attack younger than 55, or if an immediate female relative has had one younger than 65.

Even then, looking after ourselves can lower the risk.

Smoking and physical activity play a big part. Not doing the former and doing a decent amount of the latter will get you off to a good start.

And of course what we put in our mouths is really important. Eating for a healthy heart is the same as eating for the prevention of other diseases such as cancer or diabetes, which is similar to eating for weight control.

It means eating a varied, balanced, plant-based diet. It means eating a variety of lots of vegetables and keeping an eye on a few other things.

One of these is salt. There's a strong link between high blood pressure and a higher risk of heart disease. And excess salt intake raises blood pressure. Most of us get more salt than we need, because it's often in processed foods, sometimes where we'd least expect it. Eating fewer of these will keep your salt intake down.

With processed staples like bread and sauces, keep an eye on labels and compare products. It's surprising how much the sodium can vary from brand to brand.

A lesser-known but just as important way to lower blood pressure is to get more potassium. Sodium and potassium play interdependent roles in our bodies; increasing potassium while also lowering our sodium can be even better for us than cutting sodium alone. And where is potassium found? In our friends, vegetables and fruit.

There has been a lot of talk about fat being back on the healthy list - see Time magazine's cover line last June: "Eat Butter". Unfortunately, if the only thing you took from that was the advice to eat butter, you wouldn't be doing your heart any favours.

Despite the headlines, the evidence around saturated fat and heart disease has not changed: there's a convincing body of evidence linking the two, and deaths from heart disease have dropped dramatically along with our intake of saturated fat from meat and dairy.

Choose healthier fats such as olive and vegetable oils and watch the animal fat and refined carbs.

And finally a reality check on alcohol. Sadly the heart-health benefits of alcohol - even red wine - have been widely overstated and the harms are often underplayed. Realistically, we're better off not drinking.

If you do drink, do it consciously. Have a few consecutive alcohol-free days every week, and don't save up and binge in the weekend. When it comes to the booze, tough love is best for our hearts.

• Niki Bezzant is editor-in-chief of Healthy Food Guide magazine and a passionate cook with a lifelong interest in health.

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