You’ve had it drummed into your head for the past 50 years that eating grains is the best way to avoid heart disease. But the result of millions of Americans following misguided dietary advice couldn’t be clearer: rates of heart disease (and diabetes) have skyrocketed over 900%.

In other words, the massive shift to a grain-based diet has been a wholesale health disaster. I’ll show you why — and give you some advice on what you should really eat for lifelong heart health.

The USDA’s “food pyramid” says you should eat 6 to11 servings of grain-based foods every day, including rice, pasta, bread, and cereal. The one thing all these foods have in common is that they’re starchy and high in carbohydrates.

Starchy, high-carb foods spike your blood sugar levels. This kicks your pancreas into gear, ramping up your blood insulin levels.

Insulin’s a hormone. It tells your body that the “eating is good” so it may as well start storing those excess calories — as fat. So the more insulin your body makes, the more fat your body stores. The more fat your body stores, the more pounds you pack on. The more pounds you pack on, the harder your heart has to work getting you up those stairs.

It’s not hard to see what this does to you over time. If you’re “spiking” with high-carb foods six to eleven times a day like the government tells you to, you’re doing some real damage to your health. And your heart’s the main victim.

This is a clinically proven fact. Researchers at Harvard recently looked into the effects of a grain-based, high-carbohydrate diet on heart health. It was the largest study of its kind ever, with the results published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. They tracked the eating habits of 80,000 women over the course of two decades. Their finding? Women who ate a low-carb diet cut their risk of heart disease by a whopping 30%.1

This really shouldn’t come as such a surprise. All you have to do is imagine yourself as a pre-historic hunter-gatherer, 13,000 years ago, before humans figured out how to make grains into something edible.

If you saw a patch of wild berries, you’d eat them. If you came across a bunch of vegetables, a grove of nut-bearing or fruit trees, or a plant ripe with seeds, you’d eat those, too. And occasionally you’d enjoy a windfall of meat and fat from a successful hunt.

But if you came across a stand of wild wheat, what would you do? If you were lucky, you’d see some deer or antelope munching on it and go after them. But it wouldn’t occur to you to even try eating those wheat stalks. They’re indigestible, they have no flavor, and they’d just give you cramps — or worse. There’d be nothing appetizing about them.

For the vast majority of the millions of years human beings have roamed the earth, we’ve survived on meat, berries, seeds, above-ground vegetables, and seasonal fresh fruits — not grains. Our physiology evolved around this basic diet. And in evolutionary terms, the amount of time since we started eating grains is a blink of the eye.

The archaeological record shows that the modern epidemic of chronic diseases appeared at the same time we switched to a diet based on agriculture. The evidence for this cropped up in ancient burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio River valleys — right in the middle of modern farm country.

Archaeologists looked at 800 skeletons of these native peoples and found that when corn became the staple of their diet, they also experienced a 50% increase in malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron deficiency, and a threefold increase in infectious disease compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors.2

So what should you do about grains? As far as overall diet goes, stick to the foods our ancestors ate: lean meat, fresh fruit and produce, seeds, and nuts. Go for minimally processed foods — organic, free-range meat and poultry, wild-caught fish, and organic produce. Eat less carbs.

And when it comes to eating carbs, consult something called the “glycemic index.”

The glycemic index (GI) ranks foods on how rapidly they spike your blood sugar levels. They’re rated in percentage terms. So a food with a glycemic index of 50% will cause half of the rapid rise in your blood sugar level than pure natural sugar (GI rank: 100%).

Since you don’t want to spike your blood sugar levels, simply stick with foods with that rank low on the glycemic index.

Here’s a sample of common foods and their ranking:

If you look at the table carefully, you can see that sweet potatoes have a lower glycemic index than potatoes, even though they’re “sweeter.”

You may also be surprised to see that:

1. Whole wheat bread raises blood sugar levels more than white bread.
2. Corn flakes raise blood sugar twice as much as orange juice.
3. You get more blood sugar from pasta than you do ice cream.

Pay attention to this chart. Reduce (drastically if you can) the amount of foods that score high on the glycemic index.  Instead, substitute lower-scoring foods.

You’ll shed pounds, ramp up your energy levels, improve overall health — and avoid heart disease for life.

References

1. Halton et al. New England Journal of Medicine 2006; 355(19):1991-2002.
2. Cordain et al. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2000; 71(3):682-692.

[Ed. Note: Dr. Sears, Chairman of the Board of Total Health Breakthroughs, is a practicing physician and the author of The Doctor's Heart Cure, is a leading authority on longevity, physical fitness and heart health. For more information, click here.]

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