Heart surgeon issues warning against food eaten by millions daily ‘destroying your heart'

A heart surgeon has warned that popular foods people are eating all the time were 'destroying your heart' and causing people to have heart attacks which landed people in his operating room every week.

Doctor Philip Ovadia has carried out over 3,000 heart surgeries and said some food 'in most people's kitchens' right now was the culprit behind many folks needing to go under the knife.

"This food drives insulin resistance, triggers chronic inflammation, and is slowly destroying your heart," the surgeon said, explaining that when he was operating on someone he could see exactly what had caused their heart attack.

He described seeing build up of plaque that was 'soft, unstable, and highly inflammatory' which 'suddenly ruptures and blocks the artery', and 'hard, calcified plaque' that had 'gradually choked off that blood supply going through that artery'.

While Dr Ovadia said most people assumed red meat and saturated fats were the prime suspects, the heart surgeon said 'highly processed carbohydrates' were the real culprit.

Health experts keep warning about the dangers of processed foods (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

Describing the main factors that resulted in people having plaque that results in heart attacks as 'insulin resistance, chronic high blood sugar, inflammation, and visceral fat', he listed all sorts of foods people eat on a regular basis.

"I don't just mean candy and soda," the heart surgeon explained.

"I'm talking about white bread, bagels, breakfast cereals, crackers, pasta, chips, granola bars, flavoured yogurt, fruit juice, instant oatmeal and most whole grain packaged products.

"Even foods marketed as healthy, like low-fat granola, whole wheat bread, and rice cakes are loaded with these refined carbs.

"These foods spike your blood sugar and your insulin repeatedly, they promote chronic inflammation, they drive visceral fat storage.

"And they create exactly the inflammatory environment that turns into that soft, unstable plaque I see causing heart attacks every week in the operating room."

His advice to people is to cut out the processed carbs from their diets as they're the foods he sees doing 'the most damage' to people's hearts, and he reckons people ought to replace them with 'real whole foods' like vegetables, animal proteins and 'healthy fats in their natural form'.

Fellow heart surgeon Dr Jeremy London agrees that heavily processed foods are really bad for your heart as he told people to stay well away from things packed full of additives and artificial ingredients but are light on actual nutrition.

Basically, it was pretty much any food he reckoned 'your grandmother wouldn’t have' somewhere in her kitchen.

Meanwhile, NHS doctor Chris van Tulleken said heavily processed foods had 'overtaken tobacco as the leading cause of early death on planet Earth'.