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1.
Convince your
wife to stop smoking.
Nonsmoking husbands of wives that smoke
face a 92% increase in their risk of heart attack,
according to a report in the Journal of the
American College of Cardiology.
Breathing secondhand smoke boosts
LDL (bad)
cholesterol levels, decreases
HDL (good)
cholesterol, and increases your blood’s tendency
to clot.
2.
Walk, run, or lift weights for 30
minutes four times a week.
Middle-aged men who exercised
vigorously for 2 or more hours cumulatively per
week had 60% less risk of heart attack than
inactive men did, according to the New England
Journal of Medicine.
3.
Lose 10 to 20
pounds.
If you’re overweight, dropping 10 to 20
pounds could lower your risk of dying from a first
heart attack by 16 percent. Being
overweight drives up cholesterol and blood
pressure, the precursors to coronary disease. A 10-year
Mayo Clinic study found that overweight people had
heart attacks 3.6 years earlier than normal weight
people did, and that obese heart attack patients
tended to be 8.2 years younger than normal-weight
victims.
4.
Drink five glasses of water a
day.
In a study at Loma Linda University,
men who drank that many 8-ounce glasses were 54%
less likely to have a fatal heart attack than
those who drank fewer.
Researchers say the water dilutes the
blood, making it less likely to clot.
5.
Switch from coffee to
tea.
A Dutch study found that people who
drank three cups of tea a day had half the risk of
heart attack than those who didn’t drink tea at
all.
Potent antioxidants, called flavonoids, in
tea may provide a protective effect.
6.
Grill salmon on
Saturday,
have a tuna sandwich on Tuesday.
Researchers at the Harvard School of Health
say that eating fish at least twice a week can
lower your heart disease risk by more than 30
percent.
The magic ingredient is the omega-3 fatty
acids found in fish. In another
study, men without heart disease were 10% less
likely to die suddenly when their blood levels of
omega-3s were high.
7.
Ask your doctor about vitamin E and
aspirin.
Men who took the antioxidant and the
blood thinner daily cut the plaque in their
clogged arteries by more than 80%, according to a
recent University of Pennsylvania
study.
8.
Eat a cup of Total Cornflakes for
breakfast.
This cereal has one of the highest
concentrations of folic acid (675 micrograms) of
any cold cereal. (Folic
acid is the supplemental form of folate.) Taking in
that much folic acid daily (the recommended amount
is 400mcg) cuts your risk of cardiovascular
disease by 13%, according to researchers at Tulane
University.
Folate works by reducing blood levels of
artery-damaging homocysteine.
9.
Count to 10.
Creating a 10-second buffer before
reacting to a stressful situation may be enough to
cool you down. Men who
respond to stress with anger are three times
likelier to be diagnosed with heart disease and
five times likelier to have a heart attack before
turning 55, say researchers at Johns Hopkins
University.
10.Eat
watermelon.
It contains about 40% more lycopene
than is found in
raw tomatoes, and a new study
by the Agricultural
Research Service of the USDA shows that your body
absorbs it at higher
levels due to the melon’s high water content. Half a
wedge may boost heart disease prevention by
30% | 