Heart Health

Helping to Prevent Congestive Heart Failure

Michael T. Sapko M.D.,  Ph.D.

Your heart starts beating while you are in the womb and beats at least once a second for your entire life, so maintaining a healthy heart is also a life long process. When you stop to think about it, we ask a lot of our hearts. We ask our hearts to send controlled and predictable electrical impulses across its chambers. Not only do we expect the heart to pump each time the tiny electrical current passes across it, but we expect the atria and ventricles to squeeze and relax at just the right times. Then we ask our hearts to pump blood throughout the body, through countless arteries and capillaries. Given the demands that we place on our hearts, shouldn’t we do what we can to keep our heart as healthy as possible?

Heart health is dependent on a large number of factors; some are within our control and others are outside of our control. If you have risk factors for heart disease that are outside of your control, you need to work a little bit harder to ensure heart health. For instance, if you have a strong genetic predisposition to heart disease (meaning that heart disease runs in your family) then you will need to compensate for that increased risk by doing other heart healthy behaviors. By the way, if you do have heart disease in your family, the earlier that a problem occurred in your relatives, the higher the risk to you. In other words, if your father had a heart attack in at age 40, your cardiac family history is much more important to your heart health than if your father had his first heart attack when he was 80.

The foods that we eat have a great impact on our overall heart health.

Certain foods that we eat can increase our risk for heart disease while others can help to ensure heart health. The biggest impact of food on heart health comes from the amount and types of fat that we eat. When we eat fat, it is absorbed by our gastrointestinal tract and travels through the hepatic portal vein to the liver. When fats enter the liver for processing, a portion of them get converted into cholesterol. That’s right, the same cholesterol that your doctor measures in your blood. In fact, the fats that we eat have a huge impact on the levels and relative amounts of cholesterol in our blood. To keep your heart healthy, try to limit your overall fat intake each day to the recommended daily allowance for you. In most adults that is about 65 grams per day. However, the kind of fat that you eat also has an impact on your cholesterol and on heart health. Within those 65 grams of fat, only 20 grams of fat should be saturated fats. If you have been told that you have high cholesterol, you may need to restrict fat intake even further. Ask your doctor. Trans fats are without any nutritive value whatsoever—unlike saturated fats, you do not need trans fats in your diet in order to survive. Therefore, many public health organizations are advocating that trans fats be completely eliminated from all foods. This is not such a bad idea for you to do at home and it certainly can go a long way towards heart health.

Heart health is not just about eliminating fats from your diet, it is also about choosing healthy fats to eat. Did you know that eating certain fats can actually help to improve your cholesterol? It is true. Mono and poly unsaturated fats, eaten in moderation, can help to raise HDL or “good” cholesterol levels in the blood. In fact, omega-3 fatty acids are also quite good for heart health. Fatty fish like salmon and tuna can help promote heart health because they have a rich supply of these omega-3 fatty acids. Can eat as much fish as you would like or really not a big fan of the taste? These omega-3 fatty acids are available in capsules. Eating a handful of nuts each day is a tasty way to improve HDL levels. As with all things in life, however, practicing moderation is the best approach. Too many nuts each day leads to too much fat intake and any benefit that you may have received goes away.

Eating foods high in cholesterol leads to cholesterol in the blood. While it is the fats that we eat that directly determine the amount and type of cholesterol in our blood, it is always a good idea to put reasonable limits on dietary cholesterol. In people with certain genetic predispositions (your doctor can tell you if you are one of these people), the link between dietary cholesterol and circulating blood cholesterol is much stronger. Therefore dietary cholesterol intake should be monitored fairly closely. A bit of good news: foods that are high in saturated fats are almost always also high in cholesterol content. That means that when you attempt to eat fewer saturated fats, you will also be eliminating high cholesterol foods as well.

Another way to promote heart health is to limit the number of calories that you eat each day.

A typical person only needs a couple thousand calories per day. Any calories that we eat in excess of the amount we need to fuel our bodies gets converted to and stored as fat. Fat deposition, especially in the torso, is a major risk factor for heart disease and is certainly not good for heart health.

Two dietary changes for heart health that are fairly easy to implement yet seem to elude most people are fiber and water.

Dietary fiber is quite an amazing thing, really, especially for something that we do not absorb and that passes right through us. The recommended daily allowance of fiber for adults is on the order of 24 grams per day. Most people get far less than that amount. Dietary fiber helps your digestive track to stay regular and has been shown to absorb a lot of the harmful things that make it into our mouths on a daily basis. The fiber binds to these things and carries them along our gastrointestinal tract to be harmlessly released on the other side. Fiber can improve blood cholesterol numbers slightly as well by holding on to some of the excess fats and cholesterol that we eat. A relatively rapid and efficient digestive tract means that our bodies do not spend an inordinate amount of time absorbing the food that we eat. Instead it is kept moving right along. What is more, dietary fiber can actually make us feel a bit more full for a given amount of food. In turn, we eat less and minimize our calorie intake. Food manufacturers are beginning to understand the importance of fiber in food and are making attempts to include more dietary fiber in their foods or to utilize processes that preserve some of the original fiber content in the original food.

Most people do not nearly get enough water each day, which is sad given its beneficial effects on heart health. This resource is freely available yet for some reason we do not take advantage of it. Proper hydration not only helps us to feel full, but it allows our bodies to run more efficiently. All of our cellular processes run on a relative sea of water and our hearts need a certain amount of water in the blood in order to pump most efficiently.

Blood Pressure for Heart Health

The heart needs to pump blood to every area of the body and blood pressure in the arteries helps the heart to perform that function. Unfortunately, too much pressure in the blood vessels can put an unhealthy amount of stress on the heart. Just like any body builder knows, if you continue to challenge muscles with heavy lifting, the muscles that you challenge will grow. The heavier the weights that you pump, the bigger the muscles will grow. When it comes to cardiac muscle (heart muscle) too much muscle is very unhealthy. As the heart muscle grows (from years of pumping blood for a person with high blood pressure), it becomes less effective at pumping, does not get enough oxygen from the coronary arteries and can ultimately fail. Keeping your blood pressure under control is an excellent way to promote heart health. In so doing, your heart can easily and effectively pump blood to all tissues of the body and still get an adequate blood supply from the coronaries. The best way to keep your blood pressure low is to limit your salt intake and get a sufficient amount of cardiovascular exercise. If your doctor has determined that blood pressure medicine can help, you should take it. Many people find taking pills objectionable when they feel fine. High blood pressure is insidious that way—it is sometimes called the silent killer. You can feel more or less perfectly healthy until the worst happens.

Exercise is a great way to keep your heart healthy.

Cardiovascular exercise is a great way to exercise the heart without making the cardiac muscle become too big and bulky. Aerobic exercise challenges the heart, but in a very positive way. It strengthens the heart but also “trains” the blood vessels as well as opposed to the pathological response of high blood pressure. Regular exercise and cardiovascular training keeps all of your organs healthy, especially your heart. Exercise has been shown to reduce stress levels and stress hormones. Stress hormones, incidentally, can be quite bad for the heart. By staying physically fit, you body is less likely to become stressed (with the release of stress hormones) because a certain degree of physical fitness allows your heart and body to weather the storm. Unfit people tend to stress their bodies with even the most minor of mental and physical activities, which is quite a problem for the heart and blood vessels. Our lives will always have a certain amount of stress but learning how to effectively deal with stress, even use the stress to advantage, can have a positive effect on heart health. In addition to exercise, there are various forms of meditation that can relieve stress. These techniques take training and dedication, but are markedly and surprisingly effective methods for stress relief.

Heart Health Killers

Smoking is a terrible disease.

Notice that I call it a disease rather than a habit. Stedman’s Medical Dictionary defines a disease as an interruption, cessation or disorder of body functions, systems, or organs. Smoking certainly interrupts the normal function of various organs and systems and it is certainly a disorder on many levels. It is also a disease because once a person becomes addicted to nicotine and psychologically dependent on the act, it can be very difficult to cure (quit). How do we know that smoking cigarettes compromises heart health? There are many lines of evidence, but here are two that I find particularly illustrative. 1) The risk of heart attack directly correlates with the number of cigarettes that one smokes, and 2) The longer that you smoke, the greater the risk for heart attack. In science this is called a dose-dependent response: the higher the dose, the greater the response. Sadly, the “response” in this case is death and disability.

Alcohol is a tricky subject when it comes to heart health.

Several lines of evidence support the notion that one or two alcoholic beverages can improve blood vessel health and cholesterol levels. Specifically for heart health, alcohol is not so friendly. Doctors have long recognized that alcohol can be directly irritating to the heart. In fact the term “holiday heart” was coined to describe spike in the number of cases of heart arrhythmias that occur over the holidays. The holidays, for many people, are a time in which they allow themselves to have a nip or two of alcohol. In certain people, the alcohol interferes with the electrical system of the heart which leads to atrial fibrillation. This is felt as heart palpitations or a “fluttering heart.” Thus, in some people, alcohol may not be so heart healthy.

Further Education for Heart Health

If you are truly interested in heart health (and really, we all should be) some larger hospitals provide education services to teach people strategies to achieve and maintain heart health. Sadly, most people only access these services after they have had a heart attack or stroke, but the medical professionals that administer these services would love to see you before a big, life altering event. Ask your physician to refer you to one of these Preventive Cardiology programs. She will be very impressed that you are taking such a proactive approach to heart health!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael T. Spako is an M.D. who specializes in medical writing. I am pleased to have him as the principal writer for this congestive heart failure site, and look forward to his further contributions. Donald Urquhart, Psychologist, Editor.

If you want to come back to www.HeartFailureCongestive.com again, please add HeartFailureCongestive.com to your bookmarks or favorites now, otherwise you'll forget like everyone does! Please also remember,www.HeartFailureCongestive.com, like all our web sites, is an educational one. HeartFailureCongestive.com is NOT designed to diagnose nor treat but to offer understanding, ideas and options for you to discuss with your doctor. Our Privacy Policy can be found at www.cholesterolcholestrol.com/privacypolicy.htm Copyright © 2000-present Donald Urquhart. All Rights Reserved. Designated trademarks and brands are the property of their respective owners. Use of HeartFailureCongestive.com constitutes acceptance of our legal disclaimer.