MINDFUL WELLNESS

Eat well

Let’s go nuts!

Give your heart a boost with a Christmas classic: new research from the American Heart Association has found that adults who ate half a cup of walnuts daily for two years lowered levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol – that’s the ‘bad cholesterol’ to you and me. Regularly eating walnuts, a rich source of omega-3 fatty acids, reduced the number of LDL particles, a predictor of heart disease. Once Christmas is over and your nut bowl is relegated to the cupboard, throw them on salads, pile them on porridge or munch as an on-the-go snack.

Plant power

We all know that plant-based diets are good for us, but two recently released studies cement the theory. Researchers found that young adults and, notably, postmenopausal women had fewer heart attacks and were less likely to develop cardiovascular disease when they ate more plant-based foods.