Can You Prevent Heart Disease?
The incidence of heart disease is increasing and brings chronic poor health. This has lead to many of us looking for natural ways to prevent heart disease. Many of us end up needing medications to lower blood pressure and cholesterol, but can we avoid that?
Given the prevalence of heart disease, there are many good reasons to take precautions early and try to find ways to prevent heart disease from occurring. First we need to understand what has lead to the increase in cardiovascular problems including heart attacks and circulatory problems.
Living a fast pace life in the twenty-first century has resulted in many of us spending less time exercising or cooking healthy well-balanced meals. Many turn to caffeine and nicotine to cope with a busy day ahead, and turn to alcohol to slow down at the end of the day.
Vegetables and fresh fruits have been replaced with junk foods that are low in fiber and valuable polyunsaturated fat and instead heavy in carbohydrates and saturated fat. In the short term it seems convenient but can lead to problems in old age,
Although years of research have been unable to exactly explain the cause of heart disease, risk factors have been identified that can help us find ways to prevent it. So we need to understand what risk factors for heart disease have been identified.
Risk Factors For Heart Disease
high cholesterol
cigarette smoking
high blood pressure
diabetes mellitus
chronic emotional stress
elevated homocysteine
lack of physical activity
family history of heart disease.
Luckily, a lot of these risk factors can be modified and possibly eliminated through healthy choices. Simple changes to the way you choose to live your life can reduce your risk and go a long way to prevent heart disease.
Some ways to prevent heart disease result from making some small changes in your diet, exercising regularly, taking a few nutritional supplements, and engaging in nurturing social activities.
These ways to prevent heart disease can maximize your chances of living a long and healthy life. Keeping the heart and blood vessels healthy is very important. You may want to include the following ten things every day as some of the ways to help prevent disease and keep your heart healthy.
Natural Ways To Help Prevent Heart Disease
1. Exercise
Increasing your activity levels and taking more exercise is important. Exercise helps a lot for good blood circulation. You don’t need to head off to the gym or start running marathons. In fact you should definitely not do that immediately if you have been sedentary for years.
Even simple exercises like breathing deeply for twenty minutes daily, climbing the stairs instead of taking the elevator, taking a walk during your lunch break or riding a bike to work will help.
2. Fresh Fruits and Vegetables
It’s an old phrase but has a lot of basis in truth “you are what you eat”. Replacing fried, greasy foods and refined carbohydrates with servings of colorful fresh fruits and vegetables will make your diet a healthy heart-friendly one.
Plan ahead and have a selection of healthy snacks available. Nuts, fruit or vegetable sticks are a healthier TV snack than chips, crisps, chocolates.
3. Fiber
Fiber is an important part of any healthy diet. increasing the fruit and vegetable content of your diet will naturally increase the level of fiber. Additional sources that you can add to your diet include oat bran, freshly ground flax seeds, or psyllium seed husks.
4. Garlic
Adding a freshly minced garlic clove to your meal or taking two garlic tablets that contain 6000 mcg of allicin daily, can do wonders for your health.
5. Deep-Sea/Cold Water Fish
Eat a serving of mackerel, salmon, sardines, tuna, or take fish oil supplements that provides 1000 mg EPA and 500 mg DHA.
6. Fresh Citrus Juice
Drink a glass of fresh orange juice or take a 1000 mg Vitamin C supplement citrus bioflavonoids daily.
7. Red Wine
There is no doubt that excess alcohol is bad for your health but there is some evidence that a glass of red wine may be beneficial in helping to prevent health disease.
The benefits are thought to come from the antioxidants and the resveratrol. As an alternative to avoid the alcohol you could take a 100 mg pine bark supplement or grapeseed extract. You can also get many antioxidants from fruits like berries.
8. Vitamin E
Add a 400 IU natural Vitamin E to your diet daily. Combine it with 50 mg Coenzyme Q10.
9. Vitamin B-Complex
Take Vitamin B-complex supplement that contains at least 800 mcg folic acid, 50 mcg B12, and 25 mg B6.
10. Reduce stress
Stress is one of the biggest health issues that often goes unrecognized. Taking exercise will help but it is also important to take care of your mental wellbeing. Share your feelings and take some quality time with your friends, family and loved ones.
Practicing mindfulness and meditation are effective techniques to help reduce stress. Spending time outdoors has also been shown to reduce stress.
Prevent heart disease by combining simple lifestyle changes
Many of these suggestions work best when combined. One change may not make noticeable difference but when taken as a whole will have multiple advantages. And the thing is many of them build on each other. Once you improve your diet and reduce your stress, you will feel more like exercising.
This will improve your mood and feelings of self worth and help you make healthier dietary choices. Sometimes a poor diet is caused by choosing comfort foods to make us feel better in the short term.
These ways to prevent heart disease are simple and doable. All you need is discipline and the right attitude towards having a healthy heart and a healthy you. The first step is to accept that you deserve to be healthy and that you need to make a change for the better.
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