Smooth-flowing Mood that brings oxygon and essential nutrients to every celt in the body is vital for health and wellbeing. To improve your circulation and reduce your risk of disease, you need a healthy level of fats and other blood constituents as welt as optimum blood pressure. Find out how to achieve this in effective and sometimes surprising ways.

Better
BLOOD

There’s plenty you can do to keep your blood healthy and able to supply the body with the nutrients it needs. Your diet and the amount of exercise you take can influence the composition of your blood. Genetics and environmental factors also have a role to play.

• Have beans with your steak Iron is the key component of haemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying substance in red blood cells. To maximise your absorption of this valuable mineral, eat vegetable, meat or fish sources of iron in the same meal. Iron-rich foods include meat, poultry, fish, dark green vegetables, dried beans and dried fruits. The adult body contains around 4g of iron, half of which is found in our red blood cells. If iron levels fall too low, anaemia (low levels of red blood cells) can result.

• Drink orange juice with your muesli Did you know that some foods can actually block the absorption of iron from our diet? Notable iron-blocking foods include fibre-rich wholemeal cereals, dairy products, such as milk and cheese, and drinks such as tea, coffee and chocolate. It’s not possible – or advisable – to avoid many of these foods, but you can counteract their effect on iron absorption by drinking beverages between rather than with meals and by having foods or drinks that are rich in vitamin C, which boosts iron uptake. Citrus fruits, such as oranges, are particularly high in vitamin C.

• Sprinkle nuts on your salad seeds, nuts, oats, barley and soya products actively lower your blood levels of cholesterol. A study has found that including a portfolio of foods that actively lower cholesterol may be more effective, especially for lowering heart-damaging LDL cholesterol, than a low saturated fat diet alone. Try adding cholesterol-lowering foods to your low-fat regime to maximise the benefits.

• Drink green tea to improve your balance of ‘good* to ‘bad’ cholesterol. Chinese researchers have found that green tea helps lower blood levels of bad’ low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol without affecting ‘good’ hlgh-deroity lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol. So while using other cholesterol-lighting tactics such as avoiding fatty foods, enjoy green tea as often as you like.

• Watch the label For blood vessel health the most important ingredients to avoid are transfats, which appear on labels in the UK as ‘hydrogenated fats’ or ‘partially