Lifestyle Choices And Heart Disease

BAM! Be A Man. Healthy Heart. Strawberries and Blueberries.

There are some truths to life that we all must come to grips with. It is a simple truth that there are many things in our lives that can occur on a daily basis, whether monumental or hardly even noticeable at all, that are completely out of our control. Nothing that we can do or say or feel can stop them from happening or change their outcome.

However, many of the most important parts of our lives, the things that truly determine whether or not we maximize both the quality and quantity of life, and that should mean something to us, are subject to change if we decide to change them.

This realization is important to consider. Although most of us were aware that we have at least some control over our circumstances, many people fail to grasp the magnitude of that influence.

This is never more evident than health. As a population, we are reaching epidemic levels of certain diseases that, although not always, are mostly caused by poor lifestyle choices for years on end. What an unfortunate situation where people either fail to realize or fail to take action on the fact that their health, the most important thing to maintain, is largely influenced by the choices they make each day.

When discussing the long list of serious health conditions that are known to be caused by certain lifestyle choices, heart disease cannot be ignored. Heart disease, an umbrella term, is characterized by some impairment of the cardiovascular system, either the vessels throughout the body or the heart itself.

These impairments include conditions that result in the arterial walls becoming so constricted and narrowed that the flow of flood is substantially decreased, forcing the heart to work itself to exhaustion. Other categories of heart disease are characterized by structural changes within the valves and walls of the heart causing blood to not flow in the manner it should.

There are a few other conditions that make up heart disease, but the overall mechanism is as mentioned above. While most forms of heart disease are chronic conditions that can be managed relatively well with the right lifestyle changes combined with medical intervention, any disease of the heart increases the risks of heart attack and stroke substantially. It needs to be said that these medical emergencies are often anything but chronic. Not only that, they can kill you.

The remainder of this article will provide a list of the most common lifestyle factors that, when neglected, can result in a diagnosis of heart disease. While none of these factors will probably be breaking news or groundbreaking information, these well-known aspects of managing ones health can make all the difference.

Please read the article so that you can no longer claim that you did not know.

Physical Activity And Poor Diet

As human beings, we are made to move. As obesity rates continue to soar, the human body is not responding well because this is not how things were designed to work. The body’s ability to store fat is a survival mechanism remaining from times long ago when the next source of food was not promised and individuals needed to hold onto every ounce of nutrition to increase the chance of survival.

In today’s world, it is far from unusual to see individuals walking around with enormous amounts of excess body weight in the form of adipose tissue. Carrying around this extra weight places a greatly increased burden on the heart. With obesity usually comes high cholesterol, diabetes and metabolic syndrome, which are all highly correlated with heart disease.

A large percentage of people today maintain a steady routine of not getting enough exercise combined with poor nutritional habits that include eating far too many calories and failing to ingest foods that actually provide their bodies with essential vitamins and minerals. Both of these lifestyle choices are bad enough on their own, but they rarely exist individually. This combination of choices results in a strong likelihood of developing heart disease.

Stress And Hypertension

Other culprits that lead to heart disease are stress and high blood pressure. We live in an extremely fast paced world in which most of us feel like we are constantly on the go, always in a state of anxiety. Stress is not a bodily response that is meant to be experienced on a chronic basis.

Chronic stress alone is known to increase the likelihood of heart disease, primarily due to one of its side effects, high blood pressure. Furthermore, the way that many individuals choose to cope with stress, smoking, greatly compounds the issue. This is another unfortunate example of a string of lifestyle choices that continue to result in heart disease being the number one killer of men and women in the United States.