The leading cause of death for both men and women in the US, heart disease claims the lives of about 1 million Americans each year. The most common form of heart disease is coronary artery disease (CAD), which can lead to a heart attack.
What leads to a heart attack is blocked blood flow to a part of your heart. What compromised the blood flow is plaque build-up inside your arteries, a condition medically referred to as atherosclerosis. This plaque can rupture and form a blood clot that inhibits blood flow to the heart.
Unless this blockage is removed promptly, a part of your heart muscle will begin to die and be replaced with scar tissue. This can lead to even more serious issues in the future. For one thing,
a previous heart attack, especially one that damages a large area of your myocardium, leads to irregular heart rhythms which can cause another, fatal, cardiac arrest.
5 Lifestyle Changes Could Prevent 80% of Heart Attacks
As serious as this condition sounds, heart attack can almost always be prevented. Most people are already aware that lifestyle plays a vital role for heart health.
According to a new study by the Karolinska Institute, engaging in five healthy lifestyle habits could reduce first-time heart attacks in men by 80%. In the words of the researchers:
“It is not surprising that healthy lifestyle choices would lead to a reduction in heart attacks… What is surprising is how drastically the risk dropped due to these factors.”
A previous INTERHEART study in 2004, which examined heart disease risk factors in over 50 countries worldwide, found that 90% heart disease cases can be completely prevented by introducing some diet and lifestyle changes.
What do these five healthy lifestyle habits intail?
-A healthy diet
-Physical activity (walking/bicycling ≥40 min/day and exercising ≥1 h/week)
-Healthy waist circumference (waist circumference <95 cm or 37.4 inches)
-Moderate alcohol consumption (10 to 30 g/day)
-No smoking
-What Is a Healthy Diet for Your Heart?
As opposed to common belief, it is refined carbs, sugar, and processed foods that are the main culprits, and not the saturated fats found in foods such as butter, lard, or eggs.
This confusion is often associated with LDL cholesterol, also known as “bad” cholesterol. As most people believe, high LDL is linked to heart disease, and saturated fat can increase LDL in your blood. But, what most people don’t know is that there are TWO kinds of LDL cholesterol particles:
-Small, dense LDL cholesterol
-Large, “fluffy” LDL cholesterol
And, according to research, large LDL particles are not a risk factor for heart disease. It’s the small, dense LDL particles, which contribute to the accumulation of plaque in your arteries, and trans fat increases small, dense LDL. Saturated fat, on the other hand, increases large, fluffy, and benign LDL.
What’s more important is small, dense LDL particles increase with the consumption of sugar and carbohydrates, such as bread, bagels, and soda. Together, trans fats and refined carbs do far more harm than saturated fat on its own.
This had an impact on the food industry, which started introducing low-fat foods and replacing healthy saturated fats like butter and lard with harmful trans fats (vegetables oils, margarine, etc.), and lots of refined sugar and processed fructose.
This approach has clearly resulted in an ever-rising obesity and heart disease rates.
A True Heart-Healthy Diet Plan
The most important thing you need to do to protect your heart is avoid trans fats by eliminating all processed foods. This also includes most restaurant food. Next, you need to control your insulin and leptin resistance, which result from eating a diet high in sugars and grains. If you want to reduce your risk of heart disease, take the following into consideration.
-Stay away from sugar, processed fructose, and grains. This also includes cutting down most processed foods.
-Follow a healthybalanced diet of whole foods, preferably organic. Swap the grain carbs with:
-Lots of vegetables
-Low-to-moderate amount of high-quality protein (ideally organically raised, -pastured animals)
-High-quality healthy fat (saturated and monounsaturated from animal and tropical oil sources).
In fact, most people really need to increase their fat intake by 50-85% for optimal health, which isn’t even close to the 10% currently recommended. Consider the following sources of healthy fats:
-Avocados
-Butter made from raw grass-fed organic milk
-Raw dairy
-Organic pastured egg yolks
-Coconuts andcoconut oil
-Unheated organic nut oils
-Raw nuts, such as almonds, pecans, macadamia, and seeds
-Grass-fed meats