I feel sorry about Mary's husband's heart disease.

What could we say about a  anti heart-attack diet, after all the discussion
and the insights from all the articles and studies?

I venture to make a try:

1.insulin control. Insulin seems to be a major indicator of artery clogs
    (see http://www.dfhi.com/interviews/rosedale.html and others)
2.fighting insulin resistance tendencies
3.w3/w6 ratios


1. Insulin control requires to take a look at insulin elevating food items.
Somehow we have to eat our food energy and the quest is to choose
less insulin elevating items.
Fat is little insulin elevating and has a lot of energy, so it should be
ideal, to get at leas a good deal of energy from it.
However I didn't find a direct connection of fat content to insulin
elevation in the corresponding work of J.Brand Miller et al.
( http://www.geocities.com/paleolix/Look_at_IS.html Insulin score per
240kcal meals)
There *are* some commonly eaten extremely insulin elevating food items, like
white bread , baked beans, sweetened items, even some fruit (grapes
bananas). Which can be reduced or avoided.

2.emerging insulin resistence results in permanentely elevated insulin
  (rather regardless of what was eaten).
So, that tops even normal insulin control.
What works against it? I heard of successfull treatments with energy
vitamins/vitaminoids.
Vitamin B-complex, alpha lipoic acid, Co Q10, zinc, mg, selen...
Secondly the cell walls should  contain not too much SFA, as this is a
marker for insulin resistance. (See the link in Todds posting
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/CGI/wa.exe?A2=ind0201&L=paleofood&P=R2488 too
long for me to quote directly)
To replace this SFA cell walls by more fluid EFAs should take several
months. Additionally Udo Erasmus claims, that more elastic EFA-containing
cell walls would allow a better permability for red blood cells into the
small blood vessels. Quite a nice image for preventing strokes and heart
attacks.
In summary this means: less (farmed) animal fat, particularly from mammals
and more vegetable fat. This is a common recommendation.
But: choosing hydrogenated or pure w-6 fats could make the things worse,
because of point 3:

3) w-3 to w-6 fat ratio. Quit eating safflor sunflower grapeseed etc without
adding a minimum (20%) of w-3 fats. That's only possible by adding flax oil.
Maybe hemp, canola, walnut.
Or eat real wild game (ocean fish is usually wild game)

I would say much of this could be done as well in a food pyramid diet, as
long as the low IS items are choosen (real whole grains/legumes).
Except that you'll need more fat to repair the cell walls.

I wonder how the statistics could be altered by these few simple points.
- Avoid high insulin elevating food items
- avoid high SFA (and even PUFA) fats
- eat enough w-3 fats

Might be good as well *after* a h.attack.

regards,

Amadeus  Schmidt-Philipp