In most cases, people suffer from coronary artery disease (CAD), which can result in a heart attack.
Research predicts that 920,000 people in the U.S. will experience a heart attack, and about half of them will happen without any prior warning symptoms.
A heart attack is a result of the obstruction of the blood flow to a part of the heart. This leads to a buildup of plaque in the arteries (atherosclerosis), which may break and create a blood clot which will represent a blockage of the blood flow.
If this blockage is not eliminated fast, a part of the heart muscle will begin to die and will be substituted with scar tissue, which may lead to numerous health complications afterward.
For example, a previous heart attack (in particular, if it has caused a big area of the heart) poses a great risk for sudden cardiac arrest, which is the result of abnormal rhythms of the heart and can have fatal consequences.
5 Ways to Prevent Heart Attacks
Even though heart attacks occur frequently, and are a really painful experience, they can, in fact, be prevented. We all know that our lifestyle and diet play a great role in our overall health, but you surely haven’t been aware of the extent to which you can help yourself.
The Karolinska Institute conducted a study which discovered that if you do these simple 5 lifestyle changes, you may successfully prevent heart attacks as they have reduced these experiences by 80%.
Even the researchers of this study were not fully aware of the benefits of incorporating these 5 healthy changes into your everyday life:
“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.”
Moreover, these or similar results have also been revealed by a study conducted in 2004. This INTERHEART study, which aimed at discovering the heart disease risk factors in over 50 countries worldwide, found that a healthy diet and healthy lifestyle may prevent 90% of heart disease cases.
Yet, most of the people do not use these findings in order to feel the benefits. Namely, the featured study included men from 45 to 79, and only 1% of them incorporated all 5 lifestyle changes that prevent the occurrence of heart attacks.
These 5 simple, but effective, lifestyle changes include:
- A healthy diet
- Physical activity (exercising ≥1 h/week, and walking/bicycling ≥40 min/day)
- Moderate alcohol consumption (10 to 30 g/day)
- No smoking
- Healthy waist circumference (waist circumference <95 cm or 37.4 inches)
Even though you probably believe in the opposite, your biggest enemy are the following: sugar, refined carbs, and processed foods, and not the saturated fats found in eggs, lard or butter.
Yet, is understandable why you may have been confused, as fats lead to LDL cholesterol or “bad” cholesterol. Conventional belief states that high LDL is linked to heart disease and saturated fat actually increase LDL levels.
