Following a good eating plan will help you achieve and maintain a healthy eating pattern. The benefits you'll realize include a healthy body weight, a desirable blood cholesterol level and a normal blood pressure. Every meal doesn't have to meet all the guidelines. It's important to apply the guidelines to your overall eating pattern over at least several days. These guidelines may do more than improve your heart health. They may reduce your risk for other chronic health problems, including Type-2 diabetes, osteoporosis (bone loss) and some forms of cancer. Healthy food habits can help you reduce three of the major risk factors for heart attack -- high blood cholesterol, high blood pressure and excess body weight. They'll also help reduce your risk of stroke, because heart disease and high blood pressure are major risk factors for stroke.

The American Heart Association suggests an eating plan for healthy living, based on new dietary guidelines released in October 2000:

• Eat a variety of fruits and vegetables. Choose 5 or more servings per day.
  
  
• Eat a variety of grain products, including whole grains. Choose 6 or more servings per day.
  
  
• Include fat-free and low-fat milk products, fish, legumes (beans), skinless poultry and lean meats.
  
  
• Choose fats and oils with 2 grams or less saturated fat per tablespoon, such as liquid and tub margarines, canola oil and olive oil.
  
  
• Balance the number of calories you eat with the number you use each day. (To find that number, multiply the number of pounds you weigh now by 15 calories. This represents the average number of calories used in one day if you're moderately active. If you get very little exercise, multiply your weight by 13 instead of 15. Less-active people burn fewer calories.)
  
  
• Limit your intake of foods high in calories or low in nutrition, including foods like soft drinks and candy that have a lot of sugars.
  
  
• Limit foods high in saturated fat, trans fat and/or cholesterol, such as full-fat milk products, fatty meats, tropical oils, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils and egg yolks. Instead choose foods low in saturated fat, trans fat and cholesterol from the first four points above.
  
  
• Eat less than 6 grams of salt (sodium chloride) per day (2,400 milligrams of sodium.)
  
  
• Have no more than one alcoholic drink per day if you're a woman and no more than two if you're a man. "One drink" means it has no more than 1/2 ounce of pure alcohol. Examples of one drink are 12 oz. of beer, 4 oz. of wine, 1-1/2 oz. of 80-proof spirits or 1 oz. of 100-proof spirits.