How much of an impact does heart health best practices matter in childhood? They shape how people behave, eat, take care of themselves and become a heart disease risk throughout their entire lives. A good amount of psychology that makes up an adult comes from childhood. And case after case, it has been seen that children emulate their parents and practically become carbon copies of their parents in adulthood. That includes heart disease risks too.
What We Eat as Kids Shapes Us as Adults
Children who are raised consistently on a diet of processed food, fatty and saturated meals and similar end up becoming some of the highest risk categories for heart disease in adulthood. Why? Simple, the same preferences and standard food for meals in childhood continue in adulthood. Unfortunately, the body can only take so much abuse, and that toll starts to add up with heart damage. It also ends up contributing to high cholesterol and, ultimately, plaque. That artery-killer has consistently been the primary cause of heart attacks, blocking blood flow and essentially overworking the heart to pump blood until it fails.
The Root Cause in Diet
As a heart doctor, Ian Weisberg notes that saturated fats are the key element that people develop a taste for in childhood and find incredibly hard to escape when older. In many ways, the body becomes used to and expects to be fed with saturated fats. This shouldn’t be a surprise; ancient humans easily sought out and preferred protein and fat when possible versus what was most of the diet, plants and scavenging. That biological preference favors sugar and fat, and it carries over to modern human biology today.
Saturated fats occur in all types of food, most often in those that are common in childhood. That includes bacon, cheese, butter, chicken skin, whole milk, ice cream, pizza, desserts and the list goes on. All of these items and more are standard fare for a childhood diet, and they set the stage for adulthood patterns that, if not controlled or moderated, end up in poor heart health.
Trans Fats: Adding Worse On Top of Bad
Transaturated fats are a result of processing, especially with grease and preservatives. The laundry list here is also very familiar on a kids’ menu of favorite foods. That includes pastries, donuts, cookies, fried food, cakes and more. These, too, have a huge impact on heart health in adulthood, but they are provided in childhood with the only concern being sugar’s damage to teeth and cavities. It hardly creates much of a lifelong barrier to negative adulthood eating patterns.
Shifting the Paradigm
Eat your vegetables – the old nutrition phrase attributed to mothers over generations rings true; reducing sugar and fats and focusing on a plant-based diet has a tremendous impact on childhood diet patterns that are carried to adulthood. But avoiding the early training on fats, fried food and sugar, kids instead become quite accustomed to fruits and vegetables that produce a lean, healthier lifestyle which is incredibly better for the heart as well.