
Regularly monitoring your blood pressure, with support from your health care team, can help lower your risk for heart disease and stroke. You can check your blood pressure at the doctor’s office, at a pharmacy, or even at home.
Take a short blood pressure quiz here
Learn about the Heart and Hypertension Healthy DASH eating plan here from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute here
DASH is a flexible and balanced eating plan that helps create a heart-healthy eating style for life.
The DASH eating plan requires no special foods and instead provides daily and weekly nutritional goals. This plan recommends:
- Eating vegetables, fruits, and whole grains
- Including fat-free or low-fat dairy products, fish, poultry, beans, nuts, and vegetable oils
- Limiting foods that are high in saturated fat, such as fatty meats, full-fat dairy products, and tropical oils such as coconut, palm kernel, and palm oils
- Limiting sugar-sweetened beverages and sweets.
When following the DASH eating plan, it is important to choose foods that are:
- Low in saturated and trans fats
- Rich in potassium, calcium, magnesium, fiber, and protein
- Lower in sodium
Check out this link to the Mayo Clinic’s DASH Diet Recipes
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/recipes/dash-diet-recipes/rcs-20077146
The DASH eating plan is just one key part of a heart-healthy lifestyle, and combining it with other lifestyle changes such as physical activity can help you control your blood pressure and LDL-cholesterol for life.
To help prevent and control high blood pressure:
- Be physically active.
- Maintain a healthy weight.
- Limit alcohol intake.
- Manage and cope with stress.
Other lifestyle changes can improve your overall health, such as:
- If you smoke, quit.
- Get plenty of sleep.
To help make lifelong lifestyle changes, try making one change at a time and add another when you feel that you have successfully adopted the earlier changes. When you practice several healthy lifestyle habits, you are more likely to achieve and maintain healthy blood pressure and cholesterol levels.
According to Heart.org, American Heart Month spotlights heart disease, the No. 1 killer of Americans.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, among the millions of people in the country who’d had heart attacks, issued the first proclamation in 1964. Since then, U.S. presidents have annually declared February American Heart Month.
Throughout the month, the American Heart Association’s “Heart to Heart: Why Losing One Woman Is Too Many” campaign will raise awareness about how 1 in 3 women are diagnosed with heart disease annually.
The first Friday of American Heart Month, Feb. 5, is also National Wear Red Day as part of the AHA’s Go Red for Women initiative. Coast to coast, landmarks, news anchors and neighborhoods go red to raise awareness and support for the fight against heart disease. For more information on the event and other activities during the month, visit goredforwomen.org.
This year, the federally designated event is even more important due to the impact of the coronavirus on the public’s heart health, including potential harmful effects on the heart and vascular system, according to recent research.
Also, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have delayed or avoided going to hospitals for heart attacks and strokes – netting poorer outcomes and prompting the AHA to create “Don’t Die of Doubt,” a national awareness campaign that reminds people that hospitals are the safest place to go when you have symptoms.
And while in lockdown, more people have engaged in unhealthy lifestyle behaviors, such as eating poorly, drinking more alcohol and limiting physical activity, that can contribute to heart disease.
Meanwhile, heart disease continues to be the greatest health threat to Americans and is still the leading cause of death worldwide, according to the AHA’s Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics – 2021 Update.
The update, published in the association’s flagship journal Circulation, reports that nearly 18.6 million people across the globe died of cardiovascular disease in 2019, the latest year for which worldwide statistics are calculated. That’s a 17.1% increase over the past decade. And 523.2 million cases of cardiovascular disease were reported in 2019, a 26.6% increase over 2010.
During American Heart Month, the AHA and other organizations reinforce the importance of heart health, the need for more research and efforts to ensure that millions of people live longer and healthier.
In most cases, heart disease is preventable when people adopt a healthy lifestyle, which includes not smoking, maintaining a healthy weight, controlling blood sugar and cholesterol, treating high blood pressure, getting at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity a week and getting regular checkups.
Ms. Jenn Landers | Patient Advocate Alliance LLC Edited by Dr. Justin Groode