The perfect gift this Valentine’s Day is the gift of heart health. Along with Valentine’s Day, February marks American Heart Month, a great time to commit to a healthy lifestyle and make small changes that can lead to a lifetime of heart health.
Heart disease is very common. In the United States, heart disease is the leading cause of death for men, women, and people of most racial and ethnic groups.
In the United States one person dies every 33 seconds from cardiovascular disease.
In 2022, 702,880 people died from heart disease. That is 1 in every 5 deaths.
High blood pressure is a leading cause of heart disease. Nearly half of U.S. adults have high blood pressure, which puts them at risk for heart disease and stroke. And just 1 in 4 people with high blood pressure has it under control.
Heart disease is also costly. The cost of health care services, medications, and lost productivity from heart disease amounted to $252.2 billion between 2019 and 2020.
Did you know?
Obesity contributes to five of the ten leading causes of death in the U.S. including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, stoke and kidney disease.
94% of American Schools fail to meet federal standards for fat and saturated fat in school lunches.
High blood pressure, high LDL cholesterol, and smoking are key heart disease risk factors for heart disease. About half of Americans (49%) have at least one of these three risk factors.
Several other medical conditions and lifestyle choices can also put people at a higher risk for heart disease, including:
- Diabetes
- Overweight and obesity
- Poor diet
- Physical inactivity
- Excessive alcohol use
When you eat can be as important as what you eat
Remember good old breakfast, lunch and dinner?
Americans have pretty much thrown that out the window, the American Heart Association says. And that may affect how much weight we are putting on.
In fact, it might be a good idea to plan when to eat as much as what to eat, the group says in a new scientific statement. The association appointed a committee of experts to review the evidence from dozens of reports for one big study.
“This study clearly demonstrated that adults in the United States eat around the clock,” the American Heart Association says in the statement, published in the journal Circulation.
It’s still not 100 percent clear if it’s better to eat breakfast every day, or to eat less after 6 p.m. But a growing body of evidence does suggest that breakfast is good for you and that eating late at night can help you put on more pounds, even if you skipped meals earlier in the day.
“Meal timing may affect health due to its impact on the body’s internal clock,” said Marie-Pierre St-Onge, an associate professor of nutritional medicine at Columbia University who helped write the statement. Animal studies show that eating right before sleep might alter metabolism not only to promote weight gain, but in harmful ways that could help lead of diabetes and heart disease.
“However, more research would need to be done in humans before that can be stated as a fact,” she said. And more people are eating late because more people are eating at all hours, the Heart Association team found. Between 1971 and 2010, the percentage of men who eat three squares a day fell from 73 percent of men in the 1970s to 59 percent in 2010. While 75 percent of women said they ate three meals a day in the 70s, by 2010 just 63 percent did.
Skipping breakfast may or may not cause people to put on weight — studies have mixed results — but people who do not eat breakfast are far less likely to get enough vitamins and minerals, the Heart Association team found. And one consistent finding – the occasional short fast may be downright good for you. Several studies have found that people who fast as often as every other day or as little as one day a week can lose more weight than people who do not.
Beyond that, there is little consistent evidence on whether it’s best to eat at any given time, although smaller, more frequent meals may be both more fashionable and perfectly good for health, the Heart Association said. “The impact of meal timing, particularly related to the evening meal, deserves further study,” the report reads.
So until there’s more firm guidance, what should people do? Slow down, plan and enjoy eating, the group recommends.
“We suggest eating mindfully, by paying attention to planning both what you eat and when you eat meals and snacks, to combat emotional eating,” St-Onge said.
“Many people find that emotions can trigger eating episodes when they are not hungry, which often leads to eating too many calories from foods that have low nutritional value.”
Sitting Really Can Harm Your Health, Health Experts Say...
Evidence is building that sitting for too long can cause heart disease and diabetes — even in people who exercise, the American Heart Association says.
The trouble is, it's hard to measure just how inactive people are and there's not enough evidence yet to show just how much, or how often, you have to exercise to counteract the effects of sitting, the group said in a scientific update.
In the meantime, then, people should try to sit less and move more, the heart association's team of experts advised.
"The evidence to date is suggestive, but not conclusive, that sedentary behavior contributes to cardiovascular disease and diabetes risk," a team led by Deborah Rohm Young, of Kaiser Permanente, Southern California wrote.
Given the current state of the science on sedentary behavior and in the absence of sufficient data to recommend quantitative guidelines, it is appropriate to promote the advisory, 'Sit less, move more'." And it may be worthwhile to encourage desk-bound workers to get up and move a bit every hour or so. At least 30 minutes a day of moderate exercise — walking briskly rather than strolling around the house - should be the minimum goal, they advise.
Yet even this may not outweigh the effects of sitting at a computer all day, driving home in a car, and then relaxing in front of the TV or with a tablet computer.
“Regardless of how much physical activity someone gets, prolonged sedentary time could negatively impact the health of your heart and blood vessels.” Regardless of how much physical activity someone gets, prolonged sedentary time could negatively impact the health of your heart and blood vessels," Young said in a statement.
"There are many important factors we don't understand about sedentary time yet. The types of studies available identify trends but don't prove cause and effects," she added.
They did define sedentary behaviors: They include sitting, reclining, or lying down while awake as well as reading, watching television or working on the computer. Light housework or slow, leisurely walking doesn't rise to the level of moderate to vigorous physical activity.
Based on existing evidence, we found that U.S. adults are sedentary for about six to eight hours a day," Young said. "Adults 60 years and older spend between 8.5 — 9.6 hours a day in sedentary time."
The researchers cited a study that showed half of all jobs required some sort of activity in the 1960s, but now fewer than 20 percent do.
"There are clearly physiological changes that occur when physically active individuals become inactive," Young's team wrote in the journal Circulation. This includes changes in the way the body uses insulin to convert food efficiently to glucose that the body can use.
So let's do our hearts some good! Let's be mindful of what and when we eat, and let's try to sit less and move more! Our hearts and our loved ones will thank us!
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