Contributed by: Healthians Team
Introduction
A body with a happy and healthy heart lives longer. You may focus on keeping your heart healthy daily but unknowingly indulge in habits that are risky for the heart.
The most important factors that can have a significant influence on your heart include: what you eat? how much do you exercise? whether you smoke, and how well you regulate your cholesterol and blood pressure?
According to reports, 50 per cent of women in India have abnormal cholesterol levels, and with heart disease affecting women at an earlier age, it is imperative that women must learn how to lead a healthy life.
The human body needs cholesterol for several purposes, but an unhealthy lifestyle can cause cholesterol levels to rise, resulting in poor heart health.
Read on to learn about the essential habits that you can adopt for a healthy heart:
Eat more fruits and vegetables
Fruits and vegetables play an important role in shaping our health. They’re also high in dietary nitrates, which have been demonstrated to lower blood pressure, reduce arterial stiffness, and enhance blood vessel cell activity.
Increased consumption of leafy green vegetables has also been linked to a decreased risk of heart disease as per various studies.
Fruits such as berries are considered to be the best option to improve heart functioning.
Apples, bananas and oranges are also known to be quite beneficial for the heart.
Berries are high in phytonutrients and soluble fibre, which are good for your heart. In cereal or yoghurt, try blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, or raspberries to add a flavour to these delicious tools of heart health.
Follow a regular exercise regimen
We all know the importance of exercising and it’s a well-established fact that it also keeps our hearts and minds active.
Researchers say that a person who exercises more lives a longer and a healthy life.
Regular exercise reduces the demand for the heart to pump more blood to the muscles by improving the muscles’ capacity to extract oxygen from the blood.
It lowers the stress hormones, which can put a strain on the heart, while also acting as a beta-blocker, slowing the heart rate and lowering blood pressure.
Quit smoking
Regular smoking increases the formation of plaque in blood vessels. Cigarettes can harm your heart and blood vessels in the long run.
This can result in a multitude of cardiovascular problems.
Multiple disorders affecting the heart and/or blood arteries are referred to as cardiovascular diseases.
You need to quit smoking as soon as possible because it is a slow poison which is killing you every day.
Avoid saturated fat and cholesterol
Many dieticians and researchers have expressed that saturated fats and cholesterol can risk your life after a certain point.
Saturated fats found in fried foods, cream milk, cheese, butter, and meats such as pork, beef, lamb, and poultry are not health-friendly and thus should be avoided to keep the heart-healthy.
Excessive intake of fat and cholesterol-rich foods leads to obesity and a high risk of heart diseases.
High cholesterol causes plaque buildup in your heart’s arteries, which can lead to heart attacks.
Watch your food portion size
Portion size in simple terms is the amount of food that one puts on the plate for a single meal.
We frequently feed ourselves portions that appear to be similar to a single part but are made up of many pieces.
Portion management essentially entails consuming a healthy variety of meals.
Waste reduction, food expense management, appropriate apportionment, and nutritional demand augmentation are some of the advantages of portion control.
Avoid excessive salt
It is not easy to avoid salt from your diet, but you can surely limit the intake. The body retains water when it consumes too much salt.
Increased fluid in the body raises blood pressure, putting stress on blood vessels, the heart, and the kidneys.
People with high blood pressure are more likely to get heart disease and stroke as a result.
It is important to keep the salt intake in check. Fast food, fried and packaged foods have high amounts of salt so you must avoid having them.
Add whole grains and remove fine grains
Whole grains are the kind of grains that are high in iron, magnesium, manganese, and phosphorus.
Choose whole grains or other meals that are largely made up of whole grains for your meals.
Many whole grains include dietary fibre, which we all require. Most processed grains are devoid of fibre.
Dietary fibre can help lessen your risk of heart disease, stroke, obesity, and possibly Type 2 diabetes by lowering your blood cholesterol levels.
Fibre is the way to go! Fibre may help you feel full, so you’ll be satiated with fewer calories, which is also a great advantage if you’re attempting to lose weight.
Final thoughts
Here are seven wonderful habits that you can include in your routine for building a healthy heart. To maintain the condition of the heart a person needs to responsibly follow healthy habits.
There are various factors on which heart health depends so we need to check all the boxes and adopt good food habits while avoiding anything that deteriorates our health.
To minimize the risks of cardiac illnesses and complications, you should also opt for regular preventive heart checkups.
These health checks can provide you with a comprehensive insight into your heart’s health, allowing you to take necessary precautions to keep your heart healthy.
