Heart disease describes a range of conditions that affect your heart. Heart diseases include:

• Blood vessel disease, such as coronary artery disease
• Heart rhythm problems (arrhythmias)
• Heart defects you’re born with (congenital heart defects)
• Heart valve disease
• Disease of the heart muscle
• Heart infection

Many forms of heart disease can be prevented or treated with healthy lifestyle choices.

Apart from medications, making lifestyle changes is a crucial aspect of treating patients after a heart attack. Healthy lifestyle choices have both direct and indirect effects on the heart. A significant trial has shown that nine modifiable risk factors can predict 90 percent of all heart attacks. These risk factors can be positively influenced by lifestyle changes.

These would include smoking, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, fruit and vegetable intake or lack thereof, truncal obesity, physical inactivity, high levels of psychosocial stress and lack of moderate alcohol intake. These particular risk factors can all be modified with healthier lifestyle choices, including diet, exercise and appropriate structure reduction techniques.   Often seeing a local family physician or a  local cardiologist in conjunction with a registered dietitian and athletic therapist is a great option to take control of this condition. Smart Food Now and exercise is also optominal for overall health. And they are complementary, and extremely important to any medication that your physician or other health care provider will give to you following a heart attack.

Now Health Network Local Practitioners: Cardiologist

There are several ways to live a healthier life with heart failure. Firstly, monitoring your salt intake is crucial. Learning how to read food labels is important in achieving this goal. Seeking advice from a dietitian can be very helpful.

It is advised to maintain a diet with a daily intake of less than 2,000 milligrams of salt, which is considered a low-sodium diet. Typically, our daily diet consists of four to five thousand milligrams of sodium. Surprisingly, the salt shaker at the table is not the primary source of sodium intake. Over 70 percent of sodium is concealed in processed foods.

So we recommend for heart failure patients that they follow a diet of less than 2,000 milligrams a day. It prevents the fluid retention and that is, you know, when you have too much salt in the diet, you have fluid that builds up in your feet, your legs, and your belly. Sometimes it gets into the lungs and it makes it difficult to breathe.

Being active is a really important part of caring for yourself as a heart failure patient. First of all, it makes you feel better mentally, feel better physically, you sleep better, you’re less breathless. All those are really important when it comes to caring for yourself as a health failure patient.

It’s important that you talk to your family physician about an activity plan suited for you. We really encourage you to connect with your local cardiac rehab program as they can provide an exercise prescription that will help you live well with heart failure.