Freeze your spinach: a PocDoc clinician's simple trick for a healthier heart

Most heart advice asks you to overhaul your life. This doesn't.

Kate Bunyan's (Medical Clinical Director, PocDoc's) tip is smaller than that, and easier to keep. Buy spinach, and freeze what you won't use. The bag in the salad drawer that wilts before Thursday is one of the most common ways good intentions end up in the bin. Freeze it, and you've got heart-healthy greens ready for a curry, a smoothie or a pan of eggs whenever you reach for them. Less waste, less cost, more of the good stuff actually eaten.

That's the thread running through the Daily Express piece Kate features in: the foods that support a healthy heart are mostly the ordinary ones, and the trick is making them easy to stick with. Leafy greens like spinach bring folate, magnesium and fibre. Berries, oily fish, beans, wholegrains: none of it exotic, none of it expensive, all of it working quietly in your favour over years rather than days.

Kate's point is that heart health lives in the small, repeatable choices, not the dramatic ones. A habit you can keep beats a diet you abandon.

"Dr Kate Bunyan, medical director at PocDoc, explained that staples like spinach can be frozen, helping you reduce waste and keep some healthy greens on hand"¹

Food is half the picture. Numbers are the other half.

Eating well lowers your risk. It doesn't tell you where you stand. Cholesterol builds silently, and plenty of people with high levels feel completely fine, which is exactly why it gets missed.

That's the gap PocDoc's Healthy Heart Check closes. A full cholesterol profile, BMI, NHS Heart Age and a ten-year cardiovascular risk score, from a single finger-prick, delivered to a smartphone in under ten minutes. Results can flow into your NHS record, with a clear pathway to follow-up for anyone at risk. No lab. No GP wait.

Pair the two, and you've got the full loop: know your numbers, then make the small daily choices, like Kate's, that move them in the right direction.

So, next shop: grab the spinach. Freeze half. Your heart will thank you for it later.

As featured in the Daily Express. Dr Kate Bunyan is Clinical Medical Director at PocDoc.