I did not plan this post. And I wish I weren’t writing it, quite frankly. As you know, I’ve been on the road quite a bit lately, and a lot of things happened while I was out and about. But I wasn’t prepared for the news that we lost fellow food blogger, Sher, from What Did You Eat? (I knew I liked Sher from the moment I saw the name of her blog). Sher died of a sudden heart attack on July 20th, and the awesome blogging community that we’re all a part of rallied while I was in Maine to write posts on recipes from Sher’s blog in her memory on the 27th.

Since I missed this collective cyberspace ceremony, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I could do here, on Swirling Notions, for Sher. As a long-time writer on food and nutrition, my first instinct was to share any helpful knowledge I’ve gathered over the years in hopes of preventing what happened to Sher from happening to others we know and love. And as the official blogger for Clos du Bois, who has a close relationship with the organization WomenHeart, my second thought was to see if we could raise some money for WomenHeart in Sher’s memory.

So I’m doing both.

The shock of Sher’s death is a reminder that heart disease is a very real danger for women—ten times more women die of a heart attack each year than breast cancer. Often times it’s invisible but, as we’ve seen, it oft times is deadly too. In writing on food and nutrition over the past eleven years, I’ve had the privilege of speaking with many of the leading researchers in the nutrition field and combing through hundreds of studies, and a few things have stood out to me as shockingly simple changes that we can all make to reduce our risk of heart attack. I write this to myself as much as to anyone else; so much of what I default to in the name of “health” is erroneous because of decades and decades of false information carving its way into habits. So this is what I can offer in Sher’s memory . . . three things we can all do to protect our hearts:

1) Eat more olive oil. So many of us who have to keep an eye on our weight automatically shy away from anything with too much fat—recipes with more than 1 or 2 tablespoons of oil, double-digit fat grams on a label. But it has been proven—done-deal proven—that the total amount of fat we consume has nothing at all to do with our weight or our health. The amount of calories we eat dictates our weight, while the types of fat we choose impacts our health. And the “good fats” (mono-unsaturated and polyunsaturated) are really, really good. According to the findings in the expansive Nurse’s Health Study, replacing a portion of carbohydrates with an equal amount of calories from either polyunsaturated or mono-unsaturated fats lowered the risk for heart disease by about 30 to 40 percent. That means that if you take out some of the pasta from the pot and drizzle an equal amount of calories of olive oil over the top, you’ll be protecting your heart big time. Tossing in tomatoes or roasted cauliflower or kale or other veggies just ups the ante.

2) Stop eating trans-fats. Look at the label. If it has partially-hydrogenated or hydrogenated oil in it, put it back down—even if it says “0 g trans fats” somewhere on the label (a product can say that if there is less than 0.5 grams of trans fats per serving, which means you can rack up several grams in a day if you’re eating more than one serving of more than one product with, purportedly, “no” trans fats in it). There is really no dispute in the scientific community: no amount of trans-fats is safe and it wreaks terrible damage on our cardiovascular systems. As researchers from Harvard state, “for every extra 2 percent of calories from trans fat daily—about the amount in a medium order of fast-food French fries—the risk of coronary heart disease increases by 23 percent.”

3) Eat chocolate (and drink a beverage that we talk about often here). Another tie to heart health that’s been well-proven is the particular phenol present in both chocolate and a certain beverage . . . along with a host of other factors unique to both. I said this in a recent post, but I’ll say it again here: studies have shown that eating just one square of dark chocolate a day (it does have quite a few calories, so you’ve got to moderate your intake if you want to stay at a healthy weight) can lower your risk of heart attack by 50%.

I know these sound like almost ridiculously benign things, but they really can make a HUGE difference in your cardiovascular health. So there you are. To you, Sher.

As for the Second Thought, the folks at Clos du Bois are on board for raising money for WomenHeart in Sher’s memory, but we’re still ironing out details. So I’ll be back next week with more . . .