Over 800,000 Americans died from heart attacks and other cardiac illnesses lasts year, but most of those deaths — four out of five — were preventable. With a few key tips from a world-renowned heart expert you can be on your way to building a healthy heart that will last a lifetime.
Simple Steps to a Heart Healthy Diet
Ready to step up to a diet rich in the healthy nutrients your heart craves? The experts recommend staring here:
Eat a diet rich in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and fiber.
Eat fish at least twice a week.
Limit how much saturated fat, trans fat, and cholesterol you eat. Only 30% of your daily calories should come from fat, with very little of that from saturated fats.
Select fat-free, 1% fat, and low-fat dairy products.
Cut back on foods containing partially hydrogenated vegetable oils to reduce trans fat in your diet.
Limit your salt intake.
One way to make sure that your diet is rich in fruits, vegetables, and fiber, and low in saturated fats, is to divide your plate at each meal: half vegetables, 1/4 high-quality protein (like legumes — terrific sources of protein and great for a healthy heart!), and 1/4 for carbohydrates.
And remember, you should get your nutrients from foods themselves, the antioxidants and other heart-healthy goodies found in foods like blueberries, beans, and artichokes don’t pack the same punch when they’re not in food form.
Is Your Exercise Routine Really Helping You Have a Healthy Heart?
If you’re not overweight, all you need to maintain a heart healthy lifestyle is 30 minutes of moderate physical activity five or more times a week. And you don’t have to do it all at once — 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the evening are just fine. Research shows that being physically inactive is a major risk factor for developing coronary artery disease. Exercise is the gift that keeps on giving. That’s because regular, moderate exercise also helps:
Control blood pressure
Prevent diabetes
Maintain healthy cholesterol levels
If you need to lose weight, it’s going to take a little more effort. For weight management, we want low to moderate intensity activities for 60 minutes per day. A simple way to really lose weight is to decrease calories in and increase calories out, and what works best is a modest approach to both. If you just reduce your caloric intake, for example, your body slows its metabolism to compensate.”
Exactly what kind of exercise you do is less important than simply doing it in the first place. One way to make sure you don’t skip it: Structure your schedules to make an hour available for exercise.
Do You Know Your Other Heart Health Risk Factors?
A heart-healthy lifestyle is about more than just diet and exercise. The single most dangerous thing you can do to your heart is to smoke. Just by itself, cigarette smoking increases your risk of heart disease, but it also worsens other factors that contribute to heart disease:
It increases blood pressure
It increases the tendency of blood to clot
It decreases levels of HDL — the good cholesterol
If you smoke a pack a day, you have more than twice the risk of a heart attack than the average persons. A big plus: It doesn’t take long for your body — and your heart in particular — to reap the health benefits of quitting. Twenty minutes after your last cigarette, your heart rate and blood pressure drop. Two weeks to three months later, your circulation and lung function improve. Just one year after quitting, your excess risk of coronary heart disease is just half that of a smoker’s.
As a professional one of the biggest things I hear about is people on blood pressure medication or have some sort of heart condition. These are basic steps to having the most important organ in your body health again. It starts with you and the changes you want to implement, take the first steps yourself.
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