Prevention is better than cure. This adage holds true especially for heart disease. It is better to give attention to your cardiac health after your teenage years. Identifying risk factors and striving to keep them low is an important first step in preventing heart attacks. It is noteworthy that the American Heart Association recommends preventive measures for heart attacks to start by age 20.
The first occurrences of heart attacks can be fatal. Hence, it is advisable to identify the possible cause of heart attacks and steer clear of them. Preventing a second heart attack is also possible if proper medication and follow-ups are in place.
Medical professionals advise the following preventive measures:
Decrease blood pressure levels. High blood pressure causes stroke. This leads to disability that is often permanent. To reduce blood pressure, reduce the salt level in food and consume medication as per doctor’s orders.
Stop habits like smoking and drinking.
Improve blood cholesterol levels. It is important to increase the percentage of high density lipoprotein (HDL) in blood. At the same time, reduce bad cholesterol or low density lipoprotein levels. Cholesterol in the form of fat triggers heart attacks. It is advisable to reduce intake of saturated fats. Diet and exercise need to be combined with medication to improve blood cholesterol levels.
Maintain a proper height/weight ratio. Obesity is a cause of heart attacks. Eating at the right time and in small quantities reduces weight and improves the health of the heart. Pay attention to your body mass index.
Remain physically active. Performing routine activities, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, playing with kids, and running errands keep you physically active all day.
Control diabetes. When diabetes goes out of control, there are chances of silent ischemia or heart attacks. Diabetics are prone to having cardiovascular diseases due to factors such as high blood pressure, cholesterol levels, obesity and reduced physical activity.
Eat healthy in combination with exercise. It is important to eat foods that are low in cholesterol and saturated fat. The in take of omega-3 fatty acids reduces the chances of sudden death. It is also important to eat on time and in small portions. Skipping meals leads to heartburn, which causes unnecessary complications. A low amount of spice, salt and fatty substances ensures a healthier heart. You need to combine this diet with a meditation and exercise regime to stay fit.
Take medicine as prescribed by physicians. ACE inhibitors, aspirin, multivitamins and beta blockers are prescribed by physicians to prevent recurrent heart attacks. All of these reduce atherosclerosis, and improve survival of the patients. Continue consultation with heart specialist.
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How Do You Prevent Heart Attacks? Simple Changes Will Make a Dramatic Difference
Did you know that you can greatly lower or eliminate your risk of heart attack, along with a host of other diseases, just with easy adjustments in your diet? Well, you can, and it’s easy to do too! So, how do you prevent heart attacks?
Main Factors to Work on…
Quit Smoking (if you do)
Reduce Cholesterol (reduce foods with saturated and trans fats)
Reduce Inflammation-Causing Foods (Trans fats, vegetable oils, processed sugars and starches, chemical sweeteners, flavorings and preservatives)
Increase Anti-Inflammatory Foods (omega-3 oils, richly colored fruits and vegetables, certain spices)
Lose extra weight (and maintain it)
Exercise three or more days every week. Short, but strenuous bursts of effort until your muscles are tired, and you’re breathing hard, is the best way to train for weight loss and cardio health. There’s no need for expensive equipment or gym fees, floor exercises and brisk walks will work.
Reduce your Alcohol intake (If you over consume)
Try to Get 8 Hours of Sleep Nightly (for its regenerative benefits)
Kick the Habit
If you smoke, quit smoking. NOW! This is one of the most important things you can do in your fight against artery disease and the prevention of heart attacks. You must make the decision that your life is worth more than any pleasure you think you receive from smoking. You must be determined, in your mind, that you will soon be, an ex-smoker.
It might not be easy for you, but what might help is if you wean yourself off them over a months time, while thinking about the tobacco industries intentional addition of additives to your cigarettes, which keeps you hooked, and are toxic to you when burned and inhaled. Also, think about all the corporate executives, and government bureaucrats getting rich off you, as you spend your hard-earned money to kill yourself. It worked for me.
Minimize Saturated Fats
Saturated fats increase your risk of heart and artery disease, and stroke by raising bad cholesterol in your blood. Saturated fats occur naturally, mainly from animal sources, like meat and full-fat dairy, but also in some oils, such as palm and coconut. Learn to spot saturated fats by reading labels, and start minimizing them from your diet.
Eliminate Trans Fats
You must try to eliminate, or at least greatly minimize all Trans fats from your diet. Trans fats negatively affect your body in two major ways, they raise the “bad” cholesterol LDL, and lower the “good” cholesterol HDL in your blood.
Trans fats are seemingly everywhere and can be found in many foods. They’re especially found in fried foods like French fries, and other fast-foods, but are also found in abundance in pre-baked goods like in doughnuts, cookies, cakes, pastries, and biscuits. Trans fats are a main ingredient in margarine and shortening. You can easily spot trans fats by reading ingredient lists. If you find “partially hydrogenated oils” in the list, you know for certain, the product has trans fats, even if the nutrition label shows “Trans Fats: 0g”.
Limit Inflammatory Foods from Your Diet
The top inflammation offenders are foods with Trans fats, refined sugars like High Fructose Corn Syrup, foods high in omega-6′s, and chemical’s (artificial sweeteners like aspartame, additives, preservatives). Cigarette smoking, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar are also major causes of inflammation in the body.
Limit or eliminate foods made with vegetable oils that are high in Omega-6 fats (soybean, corn, sunflower, safflower, peanut, and cottonseed). All carbohydrates (sugars and starches like commercial breads, potatoes, pasta, wheat flour, most packaged snack foods, cakes, chips, etc.) have been found to have inflammatory effects in the body.
Increase Anti-Inflammatory Foods Into Your Diet
Omega-3 fatty acids have natural anti-inflammatory properties, and helps to prevent blood clots. A typical American diet has too few omega-3 fatty acids, so you should always be looking to increase your intake of them. Taking an omega-3 supplement is one of the most effective steps in reducing chronic inflammation in your body.
Omega-3 fatty acids can be naturally obtained from wild seafood naturally high in oil content like Chinook, wild salmon, sardines, herring, mackerel, and scallops. Omega-3′s are found in flaxseeds, walnuts, almonds, soybeans, dark green leafy vegetables. At home, use extra virgin olive oil for cooking and salad dressings, as it’s high in omega-3′s, and is a good source of anti-inflammatory oleic acids. Look for dressings that are made with olive oil at the store, instead of the vegetable oils mentioned above.
All richly colored raw vegetables like tomatoes, broccoli, etc., and fruits like apples, cherries and blueberries, are packed with natural anti-inflammatory compounds, and loaded with antioxidants. Use nuts instead of croutons in your salads. Spices such as Turmeric, Ginger, and Cinnamon, have powerful anti-inflammatory compounds. Keep them on hand and learn to work them into as many recipes as you can. Fresh raw garlic and onions are receiving some recent attention for being powerful anti-inflammatories.
Reading Food Labels
None of this is difficult, really! You’ll quickly know what to look for in the nutrition labels, and ingredient lists, what foods to avoid and what foods to search for. In short time, you’ll be able to instantly know what foods are good, and which are not so good for you and your family.
I’ll bet you have a much better idea of what to say, if someone asks you, “How do you prevent heart attacks?”.
How To Easily Eliminate Heart Disease Forever!
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How to Prevent Heart Attack – 3 Important Tips
There is no definite cure for heart disease, and most treatment options are very costly. Your doctor will no doubt tell you that the best tool against a heart attack is prevention, through a healthy diet and fitness plan.
Here are three important tips on how to prevent heart attack.
1. Follow a heart-healthy diet
The diet you lead today can determine the kind of health you will have tomorrow and in the near future. To keep away from heart problems, your doctor may suggest that you adopt a diet plan called the DASH or the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension.
A heart healthy diet such as this is low in cholesterol, fat and salt yet rich in vegetables, fruits, low fat dairy and whole grains.
It is important to limit “bad fats” in your diet if you want to have healthy heart. More importantly, avoid saturated and trans fats. These are the kinds of fats that can deposit onto arterial walls, which can lead to heart problems. These “bad fats” can also raise blood cholesterol levels.
Instead, take in foods rich in “good fats.” These include polyunsaturated fats like omega-3 fatty acids. These are found richly in certain types of fish (herring, mackerel, tuna, salmon and halibut), in legumes and in low-fat protein sources, and in fish oil pills. Most people simply don’t eat any fish on a regular basis, because they are afraid of potential mercury and toxins in many fish today. So they prefer to take a pure fish oil capsule instead.
Maintaining a diet that is healthy for the heart doesn’t mean that you have to starve yourself. Instead, it is about choosing the right kinds of foods and eating them in the right amounts. For example, you can eat all of the salad or steamed green vegetables that you want. You don’t have to “go hungry.”
2. Lead a healthy lifestyle
Try to evaluate your lifestyle now and see if there are things that need to be done. First and foremost, if you smoke cigarettes and tobacco products, today is a good time to stop.
Smoking is one of the leading risk factors in developing heart disease which can lead to heart attack. Tobacco smoke (even when only taken in as second-hand smoke) contains thousands of chemicals that are believed to potentially make your arteries vulnerable to atherosclerosis (narrowing).
Leading a healthy lifestyle also means avoiding excess amounts of alcohol (maximum of two drinks per day for men, one for women).
Getting off birth control pills for women, especially those over age 35, may also promote better heart health for some individuals, if advised to do so by their individual physician.
3. Get active
Physical activity of any kind that is done regularly may significantly reduce your risk for developing heart disease. An active lifestyle coupled with a healthy weight will achieve even higher pay-off.
Indulge in physical exercise regularly; at least 30 to up to 60 minutes of moderate exercise a week might be enough to offer your heart all the benefits it needs. Daily activities like housekeeping, gardening, walking the dog or even simply taking the stairs can be considered as physical exercise. Going for a long walk every weekend is a great idea.
These are just some of the simple tips on how to prevent heart attack. Minor lifestyle and diet changes can have significant impact towards heart health and there is no better time than today to start working on them.
Fish Oil for Heart Health
Ask your own doctor for more heart health ideas, including how a simple fish oil pill taken once a day might be an excellent addition to your diet plan. The popular use of fish oil today is growing steadily among heart-health conscious people. Find out why, so you don’t miss out on this amazing health food.
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Heart Exercise – Physical Activity, Your Best Pill to Prevent Heart Attacks
When we talk about heart exercise, cardiologists point out at physical activity as the best medicine to prevent heart attacks. However, in many cases, we need precise and practical information about how to put physical activity into effect.
Is not a secret that the last decades have witnessed an increase of sedentary lifestyle. We need to be aware that this increase of lack of physical activity has become best friend with other risks for cardiovascular disease such as high LDL cholesterol, low HDL cholesterol, obesity, diabetes, or high blood pressure. Thus, changes in our lifestyle, mainly our diet and exercise, are having a major impact in heart disease as well as many other chronic diseases.
Scaring statistics
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), cardiovascular diseases are the number one cause of death and are projected to remain so. An estimated 17.5 million people died from cardiovascular disease in 2005, representing 30 percent of all global deaths. Of these deaths, 7.6 million were due to heart attacks and 5.7 million due to stroke. If current trends are allowed to continue, the WHO states, by 2015 an estimated 20 million people will die from cardiovascular disease, mainly heart attacks and strokes.
Lack of physical activity is listed by the WHO among the three major causes that trigger a heart attack or a stroke, the other two being tobacco use and an unhealthy diet. We also know that people who live a sedentary life have more chances to suffer from other chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes type 2, arthritis, and osteoporosis. These health conditions not only contribute to cardiovascular disease but they also have a hand in contributing to lessen the quality of life of those people who suffer them.
However, in spite of all this information being available to us, we still find people who prefer to make excuses, such as being tired, not having enough time, or fear of injuries from exercise, to continue with a sedentary life. Could it be that people make those excuses because they have never experienced the pleasant sensations that an active life brings us, whether physical or psychological? In such case, the answer could possibly be to change our habits so we can live those adventures that a more active lifestyle rewards us with.
How to start?
An active life is a habit that should be promoted when the person is very young since this is the best period to be trained in healthy habits. Emphasis should be made on regularity because it is the most important factor to obtain most benefits.
It is worth mentioning here that people who were active during their youth but then become sedentary, lose most of the benefits they acquired during that period of their life. One of the reasons why people in the Mediterranean countries have one of the lowest incidences of heart disease in the world is because they are active throughout their whole lives.
Having said that, research shows that the people who were physically active in previous parts of their lives but who at the present time conduct a more sedentary life, once they resume exercising, they obtain favorable effects faster than those who have always been inactive.
No need to suffer!
One of the main reasons why people are reluctant to start an exercise program is because they think that in order to obtain benefits, they have to suffer. However, when it comes to health benefits from exercise, moderate intensity produces the best results for general health and for the heart in particular. Any type of exercise that can be done at a comfortable intensity, in a continuous way such as walking, biking, running, or swimming, and regularly, at least 3 to 5 times a week, will produce benefits for high blood pressure, high levels of cholesterol, losing fat, and high glucose levels.
5 easy exercise tips you can follow without suffering
1. Exercise regularly, at least 3 to 5 times a week.
2. Exercises like walking, running, swimming, or biking, when performed at moderate intensity, are the most recommended.
3. Improve your flexibility with gentle daily stretching exercises.
4. Take care of your diet and hydration, especially if you exercise for more than 60 minutes.
5. For exercise to be healthy you have to enjoy it intensively.
Final Thought
Implementing these 5 tips doesn’t sound that difficult, does it? Just remember, physical activity can make the difference whether or not you suffer a heart attack
How To Prevent–even Cure Heart Disease.
How To Prevent–even Cure Heart Disease–without Drugs Or Surgery.
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