Start with your grocery store's produce manager.

Not only will he give you a heads-up about the special on kiwis and help you pick the ripest melons, he also can introduce you to his rich and powerful friends. He knows all the colorful fruits and veggies that are rich in carotenoids -- those brilliant red, yellow, and orange pigments with potent disease-fighting properties. These antioxidant compounds can help cool the inflammation in your body that, among other things, contributes to heart and blood vessel disease.

Inflammation isn't always harmful. Sometimes it's just a sign that your immune system is working well, like when your thumb turns red and swells after you slam it in a drawer. However, chronic internal inflammation can harm healthy tissue, and a sign of that damage is a high blood level of C-reactive protein (CRP), a substance strongly linked to heart disease.

Enter fruits and vegetables. Lots of them. In a recent study, people who ate 8 servings a day of produce -- carrots, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, zucchini, radishes, red bell peppers, spinach, red cabbage, corn, peaches, apples, pears, kiwis, cherries, strawberries, nectarines, and more -- kicked up their carotenoids and significantly cut their CRP levels.

As we said, 8 servings is a lot (juice counts, by the way), and this is just one study. Still, building your diet around colorful plant-based foods has so many other proven RealAge benefits (for example, weight management, lower risk of cancer, improved vision) that there's no reason not to eat as many fruits and vegetables as possible. So have your buddy in the produce aisle introduce you to some new best friends. And since a bit of dietary fat aids absorption of carotenoids, add a drizzle of olive oil or a scattering of walnuts to your 8 daily servings.