Heart disease prevention tips

The most important trick to prevent heart disease is never to force yourself to exercise by buying hundreds of health products or getting a fitness card worth thousands of dollars, but to figure out your own rhythm of life and control a few small details that are most easily overlooked - you don't have to completely quit eating your favorite foods, you don't have to force yourself to do annoying exercises, or you don't even have to spend extra money.

To be honest, when I was rotating in the cardiology department in the past two years, I saw too many people turning heart disease prevention into "ascetic practice". In the end, they broke down after not persisting for two months, and their indicators became worse and worse. What impressed me the most was a 52-year-old middle-level employee in a company. His physical examination revealed high levels of low-density lipoprotein and occasional premature ventricular contractions. He followed a friend’s advice and directly applied for a fitness card. He ran 5 kilometers every day after get off work despite being exhausted, and his meals were boiled. However, within two months, he came for a follow-up examination due to chest tightness, and the number of premature ventricular contractions tripled.

In fact, there are no absolutely unified standards for many details of heart disease prevention in the academic community. Take eating as an example. There was a time when the entire Internet called for a complete abstinence from red meat, saying that saturated fat harms the heart. However, a new study in the "American Journal of Clinical Nutrition" recently The study also said that as long as it is not processed red meat (sausage, bacon, bacon, etc.), eating less than 500 grams of fresh lean pork, beef, and mutton meat per week will have no negative impact on the heart. On the contrary, it is much less harmful to the body than iron deficiency anemia caused by long-term vegetarian diet. If you are not happy without meat, there is no need to force yourself to eat vegetables every time. Add two spoons of soy sauce and half a spoon of sugar every time you fry the meat, which is better than anything else.

As for exercise, it doesn’t have to be 30 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise every day to be useful. When I was working as an outpatient, an old director who had been practicing medicine for 40 years said that the exercise prescription he prescribed to his old patients was never "run every day" but "stand up and walk for 2 minutes after sitting for an hour, get a glass of water, and look into the distance." Don’t think these 2 minutes are short. A foreign study that has been tracked for 8 years shows that if sedentary people take 2 minutes every hour to do low-intensity activities, the risk of death from cardiovascular disease can be reduced by 33%, which is more stable than the protective effect of running 10 kilometers on weekends. Of course, if you love running and aerobics, doing 20 minutes of exercise three or four times a week will definitely be a plus. If you don’t have time, you don’t have to feel guilty at all. Don’t wait until you have time to exercise. Just take the time to stand twice more.

What many people tend to ignore are emotions. Really, I have seen several patients with only 30% stenosis of their blood vessels, who had a fight with their family members, or stayed up for a week in a row to catch up on projects, which directly caused myocardial infarction and were sent in. There are two different opinions on emotional regulation. One group says that you should try to keep your emotions stable and don't get angry. The other group says that holding in your emotions for a long time will increase cortisol and cause more damage to the heart. In fact, to put it bluntly, don't compete with yourself. If you can't help but get angry, just vent it out, and then forget it. Don't hold it in and think about it over and over in your mind. It is more effective than any other emotion management.

By the way, many people ask whether coenzyme Q10 and deep-sea fish oil are necessary to take? To be honest here, if you have been diagnosed with coronary heart disease, heart failure, or are taking statins and have side effects of muscle soreness, it is indeed useful to take supplements as prescribed by your doctor. However, if you are a healthy person, the Q10 and Omega3 in the meat, eggs, and nuts in your daily diet are enough. Spending hundreds of dollars on imported health products is not as practical as eating deep-sea fish twice a week and a handful of nuts every day.

Actually speaking, there really aren’t that many flashy “tricks” to prevent heart disease. To put it bluntly, don’t go against your own living habits. You don’t have to copy other people’s health lists. If you like to drink milk tea, choose three-point sugar. You don’t have to force yourself to drink tasteless plain water and make yourself upset every day. If you don’t like running, just go downstairs and walk for 20 minutes after meals every day. You don’t have to go to the gym and suffer. After all, small habits that can last a lifetime are really good for your heart.