Foods Affecting the Heart Beat

The body is a complex mechanism which gives room for foods that affects the rate at which the heart beat, its various organs working together in a delicate collaboration to keep you alive.

Your heart is a central player in this collaboration, distributing the blood all your other organs need to perform their jobs and support your whole body without anything altering the functions.

Biologically, the purpose of food is to provide all these collaborators with the energy and nutrition they need to keep working together efficiently and accurately.

But many foods work against these organs, interfering with their ability to support each other. Foods that make your heart work unnecessarily harder by increasing your heart rate may be harmless in the short term, but over time they affect the efficiency of your organs' complex interrelationships.

Heart Rate and Health

The number of times your heart beats per minute is an indicator of how strong and efficient your heart is. 

The less your heart has to beat to do its job, the healthier it is. The healthier it is, the more easily it can handle life situations that temporarily force it to beat faster, such as powerful emotions or strenuous physical exertion. 

According to Montana State University's website, the average resting heart rate for a healthy non-athlete is between 60 and 80 beats per minute. 

Highly trained endurance athletes may have resting heart rates as low as 28 to 40 beats per minute.

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The Role of Food

Food provides your heart with the nutrients and energy it needs to keep beating. Your body converts dietary calories into energy that fuels all your organs; it also uses vitamins, minerals and other chemicals in food for nourishment of those organs. Your heart needs a constant supply of energy and nutrition to keep beating.

What's Good for Your Heart

The healthiest foods give your body a balance of energy and nutrition. Food delivers energy in the form of calories. 

It delivers nutrition in the form of vitamins, minerals and healthy fats like omega-3 fatty acids. Like all your other organs, your heart needs this energy and nutrition, but heart-healthy foods make its job easier in other ways. 

Fiber-rich foods like oats, beans, nuts, citrus fruits and whole grains help your system flush out cholesterol. If too much cholesterol builds up in your arteries, your heart has to beat faster and harder to keep the blood flowing through them.

What's Bad for Your Heart

Junk foods contain ingredients that work against your heart. Sweets and starchy, highly processed foods like white bread flood your bloodstream with sugars that stimulate your heart to beat faster than necessary, forcing it to work inefficiently. 

 

Foods loaded with saturated and trans fats leave deposits as they move through your system, such as plaque or cholesterol, that your body can't easily expel and that constrict the flow of your blood, making your heart work harder.