EATING TO YOUR HEART'S CONTENT

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Of course, there's more to preventing heart disease than lowering blood cholesterol. Family history is one risk factor; if your biological relatives have had early heart disease, then it's especially important to reduce other risk factors. Besides cholesterol, those include smoking and high blood pressure. Obesity, if it leads to high blood pressure or high cholesterol, also increases the damage.

Fortunately, all of these risk factors, except for smoking, can be reduced through regu lar exercise and a good diet. Nor is the best way to build a healthy diet just to avoid fat. Once the food industry comes out with fat substitutes-at least two are now up for approval by the Food and Drug Administration-you'll be encouraged to eat low-fat ice cream and potato chips. But no matter how low-fat your ice cream, eating it all day long will never make you healthy. It lacks many of the nutrients our bodies need.

Instead, the best way to achieve a healthy diet is to get in the habit of eating more fresh, wholesome, natural foods. Like fruits and vegetables. They're low in lots of stuff: low in fat, low in sodium, low in calories. But they're high in something, too. Nutrients. Vitamins and minerals. Don't forget them! One medium-sized carrot contains an average individual's required daily supply of vitamin A. Better yet, it's in the form of beta-carotene, the plant precursor to vitamin A that may help prevent lung and other cancers. Carrots also are high in fiber.

But why eat a carrot instead of taking a beta-carotene pill? Well, there's probably nothing wrong with taking beta-carotene in a supplement. But doing so gets us off the track intellectually, gets us thinking of individual nutrients as magic bullets. Lots of ads feed that notion, too, whether they're for oat bran or calcium. It's true that betacarotene looks promising from a research perspective. But here's the real news: Scientific studies find that people who eat more fruits and vegetables of all kinds have a lower incidence of certain cancers than do people who eat only a few types of fruits and vegetables, or none at all.

So take an apple to your desk for an afternoon snack, or slice some carrots into a plastic bag and put them in the fridge for your kids to munch on, and get in the habit of including a green salad with dinner. The darker the green, the more vitamins it has.

The National Research Council's 1989 report, Diet and Health: Implications for Reducing Chronic Disease Risk, puts great emphasis on fruits and vegetables and on whole grains. This is the NRC's advice: "Every day eat five or more servings of a combination of vegetables and fruits, especially green and yellow vegetables and citrus fruits. Also, increase intake of starches and other complex carbohydrates by eating six or more daily servings of a combination of breads, cereals, and legumes." (A serving, the report explains, is equal to a half cup of most fresh or cooked vegetables, fruits, dry or cooked cereals, and legumes. A serving is also defined as one medium piece of fresh fruit, one slice of bread, or one roll or mullm.)

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