The 3 Most Important Steps You Can Take to Prevent Heart Disease

Taking steps to avoid the most common cause of death in the United States — heart disease — is a great way to lead a happier, healthier, and longer life. Every 33 seconds in the US, a person dies of cardiovascular disease and one out of every five deaths in our country is attributable to heart disease.

Now let’s shift our focus to some more positive numbers — 90% of heart disease is preventable if you tackle a few key areas. And it’s those three areas that the team here at Advanced Cardiovascular Specialists wants to focus on in this month’s blog post.

1. Exercise regularly

Technology is great, but it’s a far cry from what human bodies are designed for — moving around to gather food and hunt. Sitting behind desks in front of computers and spending hours on the couch watching videos and TV is wreaking havoc on practically all areas of our health, from cardiovascular to musculoskeletal. 

This shift to a far more sedentary lifestyle is a leading risk factor for heart disease, and the best way to offset this risk factor is to incorporate more exercise into your daily routine. We aren’t suggesting that you become an Olympic athlete, but we do want you to exercise for 30-60 minutes daily.

This exercise could be chore-related — cleaning the house or doing yard work. Other great hacks for sneaking some exercise into your day are to take the stairs instead of elevators or escalators and to challenge yourself to walk whenever you can instead of taking the car.

Or, you could team up with some friends and get together for walks or learn how to play a group sport, such as pickleball.

We would also love to see you add some resistance training in there, which you can do through lifting weights, yoga, or Pilates.

2. Eat healthier

Our world has gone from one in which people didn’t have enough food to eat to one in which we’re eating too much, especially of the wrong things. People in the US consume, on average, more than 3,500 calories each day when this number should fall between 1,600 and 2,400 calories for women and 2,000 to 3,000 calories for men.

Making matters much worse, these calories are long on unhealthy ingredients, such as fats and sugars, and short on nutritional content.

An unhealthy diet can quickly lead to cardiovascular issues such as high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and obesity, all of which can put you on the path to heart disease.

So, if you want to improve your heart health, it’s imperative that you swing your diet into a healthier direction by getting rid of processed, fried, and junk foods by replacing them with fruits and vegetables, lean proteins, and whole grains.

3. Quit smoking

If you aren’t a smoker, you can skip right to the end. If you do smoke, vape, chew, or use tobacco in any form, please heed this call. Smoking is a leading risk factor for heart disease, serious lung issues, and diabetes, and we really want you to quit.

We know that quitting smoking can be difficult, but there are excellent tools that can help, and we’re happy to point you in the right direction.

In fact, we would like the opportunity to sit down with you to come up with a more personalized heart disease prevention plan that covers all three bases we review above.

To get started, please contact our office in Mountain View, California, to schedule a consultation with one of our cardiology experts.