The next time you’re in a large store, take a good look at the people you pass and consider this: If they constituted a cross section of the global population, three out of every 10 would eventually die from heart disease.

But they do not. They create a cross section of our immediate area — which means the rate will be slightly higher. If you’re uncomfortable being part of such a group, there are two things you could do.

One of them is move.

I’d suggest relocating to a specific area of the Amazon Basin inhabited by the Tsamine. (Just be sure to have your subscription of The Times News airmailed there.)

These people possess the healthiest hearts ever studied, according to Michael Gurven, a professor of anthropology at the University of California– Santa Barbara. In a recent article for Medical News Today where Gurven’s assessment appears, author Maria Cohut, calls the Tsamine “remarkable.” Not only do they “almost never develop heart disease,” but it’s also rare for them to have hypertension, high cholesterol levels, obesity, or type 2 diabetes.

But moving to the Amazon Basin isn’t nearly as healthy if live amongst the Moseten, the Tsamine’s neighbors who speak the same language and share many customs.

The Moseten’s incidence of all the aforementioned afflictions is significantly higher than the Tsamine’s — and for a perfectly logical reason. They are more willing to adopt the practices of the Western world.

As a result, they eat far more processed foods and ingest far more fat, simple carbs, sugar, and salt.

But in the same way the Moseten haven’t needed to move to the United States to eat more like the average American, you don’t need to move to the Amazon Basin to eat more like the Tsamine. All you need to do is that second thing the introduction alluded to.

Eat the way I’ve been telling you to.

I hate to be so blunt, but if you consider the analysis of nearly 1,300 Tsamine diets that recently appeared in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, you’ll see the similarities. The Tsamine diet consists of 64 percent carbohydrates, 21 percent protein, and only 15 percent fat. Virtually all of the carbs consumed are complex, the complete proteins come from fish and wild game, and the natural fats found in these three are known to be heart-healthy.

Another similarity between the Tsamine’s diet and the one I advocate: a relative lack of variety.

I’ve often stressed that having a dozen or so clearly good-for-you foods dominate your diet increases your odds of staying healthy as well as maintaining a targeted body weight.

I’m not the only advocate of such a practice.

Dawn Jackson Blatner, RD, author of The Superfood Swap, uses a phrase that succinctly summarizes my belief. She calls it “delicious monotony” and claims that finding a few healthy foods you love to eat and then eating very little else is the key to “keeping to a healthy [eating] routine.”

Blatner says, “[This practice] streamlines your diet and keeps you from making snap decisions.”

Similarly, there are no snap decisions in the Tsamine diet. The majority of the carbs they ingest, for instance, come from just two sources: rice and plantain, a vegetable used in a similar manner as a banana that contains high levels of starch and little sugar.

Additionally, the heavy use of these two vegetables makes the Tsamine diet so fiber-filled that it contains twice as much as the average American’s.

The diet I personally follow contains more than six times that, with the variant I suggest to you providing about three times the typical American’s.

To conclude, this column argues for you to eat like a group of people that seemingly shares nothing in common with you, so your heart can be as healthy as research has found theirs to be. Showing you how similar that diet is to the one I’ve prescribed for years serves not to too my own horn (well, maybe just a little bit), but to make clear that such a diet is sustainable and — if given time for your taste buds to adjust and the needed experimentation to take place — pleasurable.

And to show you that it’s the diet producing the remarkable heart health of the Tsamine — not their high degree of physical activity, the lack of pollutants in the area, or something magical in the Amazon River Basin — consider this: the Tsamine are not as heart healthy as they used to be.

The cause, according to Thomas Kraft, the lead author of the aforementioned study: ”Roads are improving in the area, as is river transport ... so [the Tsamine] are becoming a lot less isolated.” As a result, they are beginning to eat more like the Moseten and less like their grandparents.

Professor Gurven suggests that the change is inevitable when he asks,”Getting calories cheaply with less effort — who wouldn’t?”

I hope the answer is you.