5 Keys to a Healthy Heart
Happy Valentine’s Day! Today is a day for celebrating all matters of the heart, we at OMH would like to offer you the “5 Keys to a Healthy Heart.” Read the excerpt below:
A healthy lifestyle is good for your heart. You’ve heard that so often your eyes are glazing over.
But what if we told you there’s a way to cut your chances of heart disease by a whopping 87 percent? Would that get your attention?
That is, in fact, the finding of a 16-year study that tracked nearly 43,000 male health professionals, ages 40 to 75. The results appeared in the journal Circulation. They show that a combination of eating a healthy diet, staying at a healthy weight, exercising regularly, not smoking, and drinking alcohol in moderation may sharply cut your risk of heart disease.
Why? The study’s authors, from Harvard and the American Cancer Society (ACS), say those steps take aim at a number of heart disease risk factors, including blood pressure and cholesterol levels.
Lifestyle changes important
Here’s another eye-popping statistic from the study: 62 percent of the heart attacks suffered by men who didn’t follow any of the five healthy lifestyle measures might have been prevented if they had followed all five steps. In other words, healthy lifestyle changes could head off most U.S. heart attacks.
“At the beginning of the study all of these men were apparently healthy,” says lead author Stephanie E. Chiuve, Sc.D., a research fellow in the Harvard School of Public Health’s Department of Nutrition. “It shows the power of following a healthy lifestyle.”
That’s also true for women, based on a similar large, long-term study of nurses. “Even though the biology between men and women is different, that study found similar results,” says Dr. Chiuve. “The magnitude of the benefit derived from these five lifestyle factors may be different, but the benefits for everyone are clear.” Get the 5 Keys here.
