Simple lifestyle changes can bring heart health

Simple lifestyle changes can bring heart health

By Dr. Rasi Wickramasinghe

March 10, 2018

Each year, the incidence of heart disease rises, and for as long as I can remember, heart disease (including strokes, heart attacks, heart failure and arrhythmias) has been America’s No. 1 killer.

As Texans, we should be even more concerned because Texas picks up a spot in America’s top 10 states for heart disease mortality. Down here in Texas, we have a lot to be proud of, but being on this list is not one of those things.

Each year, the United States spends more than $188 billion in health care expenditure to combat heart disease and diabetes, and the price tag is growing. As a cardiologist, what surprises me the most is that, quite literally, all of the disease states that send someone down the path of a heart attack – like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes – are preventable conditions, and sometimes even reversible. All it takes is adopting a few lifestyle choices, slowly and gradually. In many cases, these lifestyle changes are more powerful than adding a medication, or even getting a heart stent.

Heart disease is caused, primarily, by the convergence of three lifestyle choices. In the patients I see in Houston, these three factors would be smoking, diet and exercise – in that order.

If you are worried about heart disease and are a smoker, the first thing you can do for yourself is to quit smoking. Nothing more could exert a more powerful effect on your overall risk of dying from a heart attack (not to mention cancer).

If you don’t smoke, diet is the next most important factor. For the past 30 years, Americans have been guzzling an industry-driven smorgasbord consisting almost entirely of processed food, which is rich in refined sugars, simple carbohydrates and preservatives. Our reliance on these products has delivered record profits to the artificial-food industry year after year. Our bodies, unfortunately, have been taking the toll because the massive quantity of refined sugar, processed carbs and preservatives outstrip our body’s ability to handle them. These sugars get deposited in the liver, causing fatty liver disease, or they get converted to fat, driving obesity, diabetes and, eventually, heart disease.

The simplest message that I give to my patients is to eat a diet rich in natural fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds with a moderate amount of meat, fish, dairy and eggs.

What every patient should avoid is any substance that is processed and created in a factory, comes in a box, carton or can, or has a list of ingredients that you do not recognize. These are the foods that got us in this mess in the first place.

Finally, I cannot overstate the importance of regular exercise. When my patients ask me how they should exercise, my answer is simple: It doesn’t matter. It matters not how much you exercise, inasmuch as how frequently you do it. Going for a walk for 10 minutes a day, every day is much better for your body than going for a one hour walk once a week. They are not the same thing.

If all Houstonians take these simple pearls to heart and focus their resolutions from 2018 to making just a single lifestyle modification – be it quitting smoking, eating more natural foods, or exercising just a little bit each day – in a few years Texas may finally lose its ignobility as one of the most heart-disease prone states in America.