Heart disease is one of the top three reasons that we and most of our loved ones will die, and I am convinced our poor Western diet has a lot to answer for.
The biggest true risk factor for coronary heart disease is cholesterol.
Indeed, it's been convincingly argued that you could be an obese, diabetic, smoking couch potato and still not develop the disease — provided the cholesterol level in your blood is low enough.
But far too many people have raised cholesterol levels because of their poor diets.
For most people raised on a conventional Western diet, cholesterol-rich gunk (plaque) accumulates inside the blood vessels that supply the heart with oxygen-rich blood.
This can lead to chest pain and pressure, known as angina. And if the plaque ruptures, a blood clot can form within the artery and cause a heart attack.
High cholesterol levels are raised by eating a diet packed with specific types of fats. These include trans fats, which you find in processed foods, meat and dairy products; saturated fat, found chiefly in animal products and junk foods; and, to a lesser extent, dietary cholesterol, which is found exclusively in animal-derived foods such as eggs.
The problem is, unhealthy, fatty meals don't only cause internal damage decades into the future — they can trigger problems within hours of going into your mouth.
But the good news is that you can reverse this damaging process just as swiftly.
There have been studies of patients with advanced heart disease who switched to plant-based diets in the hope this would stop the disease progressing further. But instead, something miraculous happened: the patients' heart disease actually started to reverse.
They weren't simply slowing the condition, they were actually getting better! It seems that as soon as they stopped eating artery-clogging diets, their bodies were able to start dissolving some of the plaque that had built up.
