Your Lifestyle and Heart Disease

Are you prepared for some exciting health news? "Ninety-nine percent of heart disease is preventable by changing your lifestyle and diet," says a professor of medicine. What’s more, scientists are discovering that we don’t have to ban salt and all fat to stay healthy. In its place, you just need to cut back on saturated fat (which comes from whole-fat dairy and meat) and trans fats (found in many processed foods and partially hydrogenated oils).

These types of fat seem to increase levels of "bad" LDL cholesterol, which lines arteries with plaque and can cause a stroke or a heart attack.
Good fats, on the other hand—such as polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats, like omega-3 fatty acids (found in some fish, sunflower oil and soybeans) — raise levels of "good" HDL cholesterol and lowers LDL levels. Meanwhile, a study challenges the notion that we all need to slash our salt intake.

It suggests that going low-sodium is more important if you’re at high risk of heart disease—say, you smoke, you have a family history of the condition or you have diabetes. Whether or not you have these risk factors, though, prevention is the key. And it starts on your plate. Three women have already staged their own heart-healthy dietary interventions, and follow in their footsteps to keep their heart pumping strong now and in the decades to come.

Recently, a woman got a health wake-up call: She was diagnosed with pre hypertension at the age of thirty, then pre diabetes the next year—both conditions that up your chances of developing heart disease.  She was placed on blood pressure medication as a result. Then her grandmother died from a stroke. The woman knew that her mother had high cholesterol and her dad had high blood pressure—heart disease risk factors that she had a chance of inheriting.