How to Prevent Heart Disease

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Heart disease, also known as Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) or Coronary Heart Disease kills more Americans each year than all the kinds of cancer put together, and accounts for about 30% of all deaths. It is usually preventable, but there are things such as gender, age and family history that are risk factors that you can not control.

Steps

1. Have your blood pressure checked occasionally. Keep your blood pressure low by eating a diet low in sodium, exercising and keeping your arteries functioning (see next step).
   
2. Eat less cholesterol, Trans and saturated fats. Those clog up your arteries, forcing your heart to work harder and even speeding up respiration.
   
3. Eat less meat. A diet low in saturated fat is one crucial factor in preventing heart disease, obesity, cancer, and diabetes among others. One way to lower your intake of saturated fat is to limit your intake of meat and high-fat dairy products. Incorporate more meatless meals into your diet. Meatless Monday is a non-profit national public health campaign in association with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health that advocates lowering your intake saturated fat by limiting meat consumption.
   
4. Exercise regularly. Exercising has so many benefits. It relieves stress, lowers your blood pressure, burns fat, strengthens your immune system and just leaves you feeling good for the rest of the day.
   
5. Stay at your healthy weight, or lose weight if you need to in order to be healthy. Shedding a few extra pounds will take a lot of stress off your heart, feet, bones, joints and lungs, and keeps your blood pressure and cholesterol levels down.
   
6. Avoid excess stress. Stress will raise your blood pressure. Always look on the bright side of things, and don’t use any chemicals as a crutch.
   
7. Avoid tobacco smoking and places where Environmental Tobacco Smoke is present. About 20% of cases of CVD are caused by smoking. 40,000 non-smoking Americans get CVD and die from secondhand smoke each year (American Heart Association). Secondhand smoke is the third leading preventable cause of death in America.
   
8. Stay drug and alcohol free. Caffeine is an addictive drug, and is in no way healthy. Other drugs produce adverse side effects. By alcohol free, this article means not having a twelve-pack and passing out each night – a little bit of red wine each day may actually be beneficial to your health.
   

Related wikiHows

• How to Avoid Trans Fats
  
• How to Limit Your Saturated Fat Intake
  
• How to Live a Long Life
  
• How to Be Calm in a Stressful Situation
  

Sources and Citations

• Meatless Monday Recipe Archive
  
• American Heart Association
  

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