Helping The Heart Stay Healthy – InVite Health Podcast, Episode 244
I think it’s safe to say that most Americans strive to live long, healthy lives. However, many people do fall short of that and chronic disease becomes a major problem. We see this becoming more of an exponential growth over time and there are many different factors that play into this. We can look at diet and our exposure to different pollutants that can have a negative impact on heart health and brain health.
Today, I want to focus in on heart disease specifically because we know that this is a major problem in the United States. Heart disease is the leading cause of death for men and women throughout the United States and close to 700,000 Americans die from heart disease each year. That’s one in every four deaths throughout this country, or we can break it down and say one person dies every 36 seconds in the United States from cardiovascular disease. I think we should bring attention to why we should be more proactive when it comes to heart health rather than reactive. We don’t want to wait until something is wrong with our heart before we take action.
Heart disease and heart attacks
We can break heart disease into different subsections. We can look at coronary artery disease, which is the most common type of heart disease.
We can also look at heart attacks. Roughly around 800,000 Americans each year have a heart attack. For many people, heart attacks are a silent process and there is significant damage done to the heart muscle itself, even though you may be unaware that you actually had a heart attack. About one in five heart attacks is actually known as a silent heart attack, where there is significant damage done, but yet you are unaware of that. Maybe it’s a situation where you do have some shortness of breath, some heaviness within the chest area and then that passes, and it wasn’t ever to the degree of severity that you felt the need to go seek medical attention.
This is why we certainly like to be able to understand more about this. When we look at Americans who are at a greater risk for the development of heart disease, this is where the problem really comes in because we understand the trifecta of things such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, metabolic syndrome and obesity.
For more information about the increased risk for heart disease, tune into the full podcast episode.
What can we do to protect our heart health?
I want to talk about some of the different things that you can be doing when it comes to lifestyle modifications, making sure that you are doing things such as heart-healthy foods, which in turn would brain-healthy foods, which in turn would be whole-body healthy foods. This is why I’m such a stickler about sticking to the Mediterranean diet because the Mediterranean-style diet really does encompass all of those main nutrients that the body needs at that cellular level in order to thrive. Getting that full spectrum of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants, along with good, healthy fats and proteins, is important. This is why adherence to that Mediterranean-style diet has been shown time after time in terms of scientific research as being the best choice when it comes to overall health. When we look at the cardiovascular studies done with the Mediterranean diet, we recognize just how beneficial that is for the heart.
Tune into the full podcast episode for some studies relating to heart disease and overall heart health.
