Tips for Your Heart to Live by
February is Heart Health month. So, today’s blog is all about the heart health in the United States and tips that you can do to help improve your cardiovascular health.
By 2035, more than 45% of the US population is projected to have some sort of Cardiovascular Disease (CVD). This statistic is very alarming. If you take into account that the United States has about 300 million people living in it, almost half of them will have some form of CVD within 10 years.
In the US, one person dies from CVD every 34 seconds. In 2020, the number of Americans that died from CVD was more than 697,000. This is the human being toll heart disease takes on our population, but what other things are affected by this ever growing issue.
Maybe your a business owner and have a fair number of employees. Did you know that between 20% and 30% of your company’s healthcare costs are spent on an employees modifiable risk factors for heart disease? Healthcare costs for CVD have continued to grow throughout the years, and with the projects mentioned above, they will continue to climb. As of 2017, the economic costs for CVD were between $214 billion and $351 billion, with more than $137 billion lost in productivity and more than $11.5 billion spent on just heart attacks alone. By 2035, the costs for CVD are projected to reach more than $1.1 trillion. It’s important to remember that right now, healthcare costs make up about 20% of the US GDP. Keeping that in mind, the pace of our healthcare costs are going to topple many of our other sectors in 2035.
tips on what you can do to improve cardiovascular function
The healthcare cost path we’re on is unsustainable, let alone the true damage which is people suffering from this horrible disease when there are things that they can do to help get out of the cardiovascular disease trenches. Below are a few tips that you can do to improve your cardiovascular function:
Eat a healthier diet: each individual has to find the diet that works for them. Concentrating on whole foods such as meats, fruits, and vegetables will are definitely the way to go. Two of the biggest things you can do when changing up your diet is cutting out both processed seed oils and refined sugar.
Processed seed oils such as canola oil, vegetable oil, peanut oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, soybean oil are all very inflammatory for the human body. In a few weeks, we will discuss the dangers of seed oils, but for this blog post, we’re going to simply say that these highly inflammatory oils do not do good things to your body. It’s best to avoid them.
The same can be said for refined and processed sugar. Sugar is one of the main causes of cardiovascular issues. Sugar is inflammatory and increases oxidative stress in your blood stream, which in turn lets loose the free radicals.
Quit Smoking: not only will it decrease your risk of CVD, but it will also lessen your body’s toxic load and help your lungs take in the oxygen they need to power your cells.
Cut or Eliminate Alcohol: alcohol not only contains sugar, but it also produces an aldehyde that is inflammatory in your blood stream when it is metabolized.
Exercise: works your entire body to improve functionality
Manage Stress: stress causes oxidative stress in your body, which in turn sets loose those free radicals in the blood stream
Lower Your Blood Pressure: the rate at which blood flows through your vascular system makes a difference. If you have hardening of the vascular walls at all, you don’t want your blood building pressure that will break through those walls. Getting your blood pressure under control is a great way to improve your cardiovascular health.
Lose Excess Weight: excess weight increases inflammation in the body. Reducing that weight will decrease your body’s inflammation, not to mention increase your functionality.
Better Sleep: restorative sleep is imperative for everyone. The better your sleep the better your body can restore and repair itself every night.