Cook your way to a health heart

You Can Cook, a Scottish Community Interest Company, is to provide a unique cookery class for recovering heart patients in a purpose-built site at Astley Ainslie Hospital in Edinburgh. The class, taking place later this month, will identify the link between a healthy diet and a healthy heart. Heart patients will be shown that by choosing certain foods, including foods that are low in saturated fats and cholesterol, their health and overall prognosis can significantly improve.

“I’m hoping to show patients that they can enjoy a simple and healthy diet, but not at the expense of their tastebuds!” said Bosco Santimano, chef and founder of You Can Cook.

“We spend a lot of time explaining to patients why and how they need to change their health behaviours. The next stage is to actually help them to do it. We've done this with exercise classes so we thought why not try a more hands-on approach with diet" said Dr Iain Todd, Consultant, Cardiac Rehabilitation Lothian, Cunningham Unit, Astley Ainslie Hospital.

Plans are in place to run similar classes for patients with other medical conditions in the future including stroke patients, diabetics and allergy sufferers.

For further information on You Can Cook log on to Youcancook.org.uk.