5 Life style changes to protect your heart and prevent heart attack: The heart is an organ that pumps blood throughout your body, through the circulatory system, supplying oxygen and nutrients to the tissues. The lifestyle changes includes:
- Take up regular exercising: 30-60 minutes of exercise a day, helps one maintain cardiovascular fitness. Research has shown that watching a movie for 2 hours straight makes you liable or prone to heart attacks. Regular exercise helps you loose weight there by helping you not to be obese, which is a risk of heart attack. It also improves your cholesterol. It increases your HDL cholesterol, the good cholesterol that lowers heart disease risk by flushing the artery- clogging LDL cholesterol out of the body system.
- Leading a heart healthy life style: eating balanced diet, low fat diets and nutrients rich foods and veggies can help in the prevention of heart attack. It is important to eat food high in nutrients and low in calories. Cholesterol is one of the substances that can lead to heart attack. Therefore, in order to prevent and manage high cholesterol, we should avoid foods that are high in saturated fats, e.g. cakes, processed meats etc. it is important we eat sea foods to aid prevention of heart attack.
- Maintain a healthy weight: studies have shown that moderately over weight people have a 43% higher risk of heart attack, if you want to reduce your risk of heart attack then you have to control your weight gain. Study has shown that excess weight alone without alcohol intake and exercise still makes you prone to heart attack.
- Properly manage diabetes: heart disease is a complication that may arise from not properly managing diabetes for a long period of time. 80% of people with diabetes die as a result of coronary heart disease. Hyperglycemia, which characterises diabetes, in combination with free fatty acids in blood can change the make up of blood vessels, leading to cardiovascular diseases. The lining of the blood vessels might become thicker and in turn impair blood flow.
- Cease smoking: smoking causes plaque to build up and harden the arteries making your heart work harder when you breathe in cigarette smoke, the blood distributed to the rest of the body is contaminated with smoke chemicals. These chemicals can damage your heart and blood vessels, which can lead to cardiovascular diseases and death.