Taking steps to reduce the risk of heart disease involves making lifestyle changes and diet plays a large role. This includes cutting back on calories if you need to lose weight and reducing the intake of salt, cholesterol and fat. However, the body needs some fat to survive, so the goal is not to eliminate fat intake, but rather to focus on eating healthy fats. This includes incorporating foods with monounsaturated fats into your daily diet.
Olive Oil
To help prevent and/or manage heart disease, the goal is to get no more than 25 to 35 percent of daily caloric intake from all fats. According to the American Heart Association, most of that should come from monounsaturated fats. To help meet this goal, try using olive oil when cooking or preparing foods. Other oils that also contain high amounts of monounsaturated fats are canola oil, peanut oil, sunflower oil and sesame oil. Oils can vary greatly in how much monounsaturated fat they contain, so take a look at the nutrition label of each individual oil to see how many grams are in each serving size. When looking for healthy fats, in general, go with fats that are liquid at room temperature rather than using products such as butter or shortening.
Avocados
Avocados are another source of monounsaturated fat that should be part of a healthy diet. While avocados are high in total fat -- a medium size avocado has about 30 grams -- most of that is in the form of monounsaturated fat. Monounsaturated fats when consumed in place of saturated fats, can lower both total cholesterol levels and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels, reports MayoClinic.com. LDL is considered the bad kind of cholesterol because it is stored in the body. When levels get too high, plaque can build up along the artery walls. Plaque build-up can deprive the heart and/or brain of blood and oxygen, which can cause a heart attack or stroke.
Nuts and Seeds
To help add monounsaturated fats into the diet, the Harvard School of Public Health suggests consuming almonds, hazelnuts, pecans, pumpkin seeds and sesame seeds. For good health, it is important not to completely restrict fat intake because high density lipoprotein, or HDL, cholesterol levels can drop as well. HDL is the good kind of cholesterol because it is excreted from the body. This means that to fully protect the heart, the goal is to lower LDL levels while raising HDL levels; getting most of your daily fat intake from monounsaturated fats can help accomplish this. Fat content varies among the types of nuts and seeds and reading the food label will tell how much of the total fat in each product is monounsaturated.
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