Love your heart and make it your valentine this year. Along with St. Valentine’s Day, February is National Heart Health Month, a time when people can focus and take charge of their cardiovascular health. Every year more than 650,000 Americans, or one in four people, die of heart disease, making it the number one cause of death. Cardiovascular disease does not discriminate, it affects all ages, genders, and ethnicities.
How can you keep your heart healthy? Take an active role in reducing your risk for heart disease. This includes eating a healthy diet, engaging in physical activity, and managing your cholesterol and blood pressure. Take this opportunity to start heart-healthy habits.
Eating Heart Healthy
Cleveland Clinic: Provides recommendations and many resources for a heart healthy diet.
Mayo Clinic: Offers simple tips for a heart-healthy diet and 8 steps to prevent heart disease.
American Heart Association’s diet and lifestyle recommendations includes nutrition recommendations, smart shopping, infographics, and information on sugars, fats, sodium and more.
National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health: This Department of the CDC provides a helpful infographic for 7 strategies to living a heart-healthy lifestyle that includes links to many resources.
Physical Activity
FitnessBlender: Husband and wife team Daniel and Kelli run this YouTube channel. Their specialty is quick and effective workouts ranging in time from 5 to 45 minutes.
JumpStart by WebMD: Provides the tools and resources you need to live an active lifestyle.
Yoga with Adrienne: A well-known YouTube channel offering yoga sessions for beginners, weight loss, meditation, target areas and more.
Blogilates: A popular channel that just celebrated its tenth year on YouTube. Hosted by certified fitness expert Cassey Ho leading viewers in various Pilates workouts.
Managing Cholesterol and Blood Pressure
Million Hearts®: CDC’s national initiative to prevent one million heart attacks and strokes in a five-year period. Its focus is to implement a small set of evidence-based priorities and targets that can improve cardiovascular health for all. Resources include cholesterol management, a hypertension control change package, a tobacco cessation change package and more.
Heart Truth®: A national health education program from the National Institutes of Health. Loaded with tools and materials to help you protect your heart including videos, high blood pressure education materials, information about women and heart disease and much more.
Fats: Know Your Fats: Cleveland Clinic’s concise guide to help you discern good fats from bad fats when choosing foods.
Learn more about Cholesterol and CAD (coronary artery disease) with this watch, live and learn interactive presentation from the American Heart Association.
CDC’s Heart Health Month in 2021 focused on the Surgeon General’s call to action on controlling hypertension. Find ways to prevent and manage high blood pressure on their high blood pressure page.
Show your heart some love and get on the road to health with this booklist.
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