Heart Disease, You Don’t Have To Wear Red This Month To Prevent CardioVascular Disease…

Here’s What You Can Do.

First let’s check out a little of the history of February being ‘Heart Health‘ Month.

Undoubtedly it was loosely associated with Valentine’s Day and love.

Here’s how February became even more closely associated with the heart.

President Johnson proclaimed February American Heart month back in 1963.

The goal was to get Americans to re-focus on the importance of heart health and cardiovascular disease because at that time cardiovascular disease was killing about half of all Americans.

Percentage-wise it seems like we’ve made some progress because now about 1 in 4 Americans die of cardiovascular disease.

The truth is that some improvements in crisis management are keeping people alive and the incidence of other diseases have taken some of the numbers from cardiovascular disease.

We’re intervening late in the process and keeping some of the people alive, but suffering.

More people die from cardiovascular disease than any other problem in Texarkana, the US, and in the world.

World-wide almost 18 million die every year. This is expected to grow to 23.6 million in the next 12 years.

In the US,  about 2,300 Americans die of cardiovascular disease each day. This is about 1 death every 38 seconds.

The vast majority, an estimated 80% +, could be prevented.

These deaths (+ the suffering, the disability, and the massive health costs) can be prevented, but the government can’t do it for us and the reality is neither can any health care professional.

The right advice can help, but changing lifestyle choices is still up to each one of us.

The empowering truth is that you can change these horrible statistics for yourself and your family.

Yes it will be difficult and it will take some change but that’s what it will take to save yourself, your family, and collectively everyone whether they live in Texarkana or anywhere else.

Improving heart disease stats will involve a massive change in our diets.

In general, our diets are highly inflammatory.

Reduce this with a primary focus on eliminating sugar, processed foods (predominately grain based foods that come in boxes and bags), fast foods, our high ‘vegetable’ oil diets, and more.

We have to move more and exercise daily, not really to lose weight (that’s primarily a diet problem), but to improve health and in the context of heart month – cardiovascular health.

We need to reduce stress – mental stress and physical stress.

Did you know that most heart attacks occur on Monday morning just before or on the way to work… and the least amount occur on the weekend?

This speaks to the fact that we might need to relax a little more, change our jobs, or at least change our attitudes towards our jobs to reduce our stress.

Physical stresses on the body are huge contributors to stress that drive pain and inflammation.

It also drives many of us to take pain relievers, many of which put us at risk of a heart attack / cardiovascular disease.

Stress increases our drive to eat bad foods which brings us back around to diet.

Our health or lack of health isn’t one thing.

Everything is related. 

We should improve our sleep, if it’s a problem.

Lack of sleep increases stress, increases inflammation, and causes us to crave bad food choices like sugar.

NY Times article about heart attacks occuring on Monday morning…

www.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/health/14real.html