Adams Media - Heart Disease: Heart-Healthy Eating: The most important information you need to improve your health

You may have heard of heart disease. Every day it seems a new article comes out about what heart disease does or what affects your heart. Not many people, though, know the full story.

Heart disease is known to be associated with heart attacks, strokes, and other cardiovascular diseases. High blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes may put you at risk. By understanding and managing these risk factors, you can avoid premature death and disability.

Having these risk factors causes buildup in your arteries, the blood vessels that deliver oxygen and nutrients to your brain. When these arteries get too clogged, parts of your organs cannot receive what cells need to survive. If this happens in the blood vessels to the heart, you may develop a heart attack. If this happens in the blood vessels to your brain, you would suffer a stroke. These diseases can leave you disabled, paralyzed, or even kill you.

What you might not know is that you can modify your risk factors and decrease the chance that you will ever develop heart disease. If you know how to lower the bad type of cholesterol and increase the good type, you can significantly prevent clogging or even unclog your arteries, reducing your chance of suffering heart attacks and strokes.

To start to manage your risk factors, you need to get tested beginning at a fairly young age. These tests require repeating every few years, and if you are higher risk, you may need testing more often to determine the proper treatment. This knowledge will help to guide you as you implement changes in your life to improve what puts you at risk.

Heart disease can be greatly influenced by your diet, physical activity, if you smoke, your weight, and your levels of stress. By making certain changes in these areas, you can reduce your chance of early death and disability. Simple changes, such as eating fewer calories and bad fats in exchange for more fiber, nutrients, and good fats, can tremendously influence your risk of heart disease. Even a modest amount of physical activity a few days a week, no matter what the activity, can have a huge impact. Not smoking and reducing stress can also make a significant impact on your risk.

These changes work by modifying many risk factors at once, such as lowering your blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar. Also, such changes in your lifestyle will give you more energy and an improved mood, improving the quality of your life.

Over the past twenty years, significant progress has been made in developing medications that address diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol and reduce the chance of cardiovascular disease. These medications can create negative side effects, but the benefits may outweigh the risks.

Overall, by understanding heart disease, how it acts, what you can do to manage it, and how to implement those actions, you can influence your future health tremendously, while potentially improving your current life.

If youd like to learn more about heart disease, check out The Everything Guide to Preventing Heart Disease , available in print (978-1-4405-2820-0) and eBook (978-1-4405-2888-0) formats.

Knowing what foods are good for you is only half the story; figuring out how to eat them regularly is the challenging part. Changing your routine is never easy, but you can do it if you keep taking small, steady steps. Once you start feeling the benefits of enjoying more fresh, wholesome foods, your new habits will become self-reinforcing. Enjoy the process as you travel toward a healthier you.