What Keeps Your Heart Healthy?

Your most important organ, the heart, is also the key to a longer life. As much as it may want to, your heart cannot defend itself from the risk factors that endanger it, leaving it all up to you to keep it healthy and beating, supplying your organs with blood and keeping you alive. Factors that you have no control of such as age, genes, gender, living conditions, and other precipitating factors will have to stay as they are, which means you have to make use of the ability to control the predisposing factors, ones which you have full control of.

To keep your heart healthy, you have to take good care of it and avoid the things that may harm it. Here are some tips to keep in mind to keep your heart healthy.

1. Maintain a healthy diet. A diet rich in fiber and omega-3 acids can help you maintain a healthier heart. On the other hand, a diet that’s high in cholesterol and fats can make your heart weak, and can pose tons of major illnesses that your heart can’t handle. A healthy diet can also strengthen most other organs in your body, making it a win-win situation for you.

2. Get enough sleep. Sleep helps improve your function and prevents clogging in the heart’s arteries, making it work less and stay healthy. Studies have also linked good circulation to getting a few more hours of sleep every night.

3. Don’t smoke. Or quit, if you’re already one of the millions of people (and growing) who suffer an addiction to nicotine. The harmful chemicals found in cigarettes can seriously put your heart at risk in developing irreversible damage and tons of different serious illnesses.

4. Physical activity. Without this, your heart can suffer from different cardiovascular diseases. Exercise can make your heart stronger and more resistant to other risk factors. Just a few hours a day can mean a lot to your heart, so do yourself a favor and start moving to keep your heart healthy and strong.

5. Avoid excessive alcohol intake. Alcohol can help increase the good cholesterol in the heart, but too much of it can lead to heart failure and hypertension, making your heart tired and weak. That’s no way of keeping your heart healthy.

6. Consult your doctor regularly. There’s nothing like keeping track of your heart’s activities, knowing about necessary precautions and knowing what to do, and what not to do. Who else can give you the best pieces of advice but a doctor?

Living a long life is one thing, living a healthy and long life is another. Being able to enjoy everything that life has to offer is possible as long as you have a healthy heart.