Cardiologist Tiffany Di Pietro recommends a Mediterranean-style diet with fish, vegetables, fruits, and beans for heart health. Avoid red meat, fried foods, and processed items. Diet needs to fit your individual health conditions and preferences.
One of the most common questions, if not the most common question, I get in my office from a lifestyle perspective is, "What diet do you recommend as a cardiologist?" And this answer, my answer, changes based upon the patient. As a blanket statement, I like a Mediterranean diet. And a Mediterranean diet, you kind of think about if you're sitting on the coast of Greece, what would you be eating? Lots of fish, lots of fresh vegetables, lots of fresh fruits and beans and things like that. Very little red meat and a little bit of poultry too, like chicken, turkey. What I tell my patients to definitely try and avoid is overeating red meat. I'm not gonna tell someone that they can't ever have red meat or, you know, never ever have a hamburger. You just really want to try and keep it to a minimum, especially the fatty kind of like fatty ground beef and like a New York strip. So try and have a filet and lean ground beef. Try and substitute ground beef in recipes for ground turkey also. And real quick about vegan— vegan's great, it's just really hard for people to do. And I find that a lot of people that eat vegan also tend to overeat carbohydrates, and we have to be careful for those patients that are pre-diabetic or diabetic. So it's very patient-dependent. It also depends on what you like. If you don't like fish, Mediterranean might not work for you, and we have to find things that do work for you. But as a general rule of thumb, not a lot of red meat, nothing fried, try not to eat anything that's been overly processed, lots of good fish, lots of fresh fruits, lots of fresh vegetables, and individualize the plan and the diet based upon what the patient likes.
