By VICTOR S. SIERPINA
How do you keep your heart beating but keep it from breaking? Let’s review the basics.
Exercise is essential. Not the kind that you get traveling from the sofa to the fridge to get some Doritos and dip and then back to the remote control. Regular walking can be incredibly beneficial. As little as 150 minutes a week, 15 flights of stairs or 10,000 steps a day all move the needle dramatically on cardiac risk from sedentary to active. You don’t need to run a marathon or live at the gym. Even if you are disabled or in pain, find adaptive movements you can do. For the rest of us, just get moving.
Of course, diet is key in heart health. If you think a heart-healthy diet is only something that an 11-year-old would reflexively decline, think again.
What is true is that trans and saturated fats, refined carbohydrates and just too many calories are hard on the heart. The recent fluff that reducing your saturated fats doesn’t really affect your heart health turns out to be bogus. Dr. David Katz, chair of Preventive Medicine at Yale Medical School, explains that recent studies imputing that saturated fats were not a risk for the heart were flawed epidemiologically.
Closer to the truth is that once it was found that these fats raised cardiac risk, the food industry adapted quickly. Thus about 30 years ago, we started seeing foods marketed as low fat, or no fat.
However, thpse “low fat” foods turned out to have highly refined carbohydrates and sugars, which aren’t fats but still promote diabetes, systemic inflammation and obesity. Whatever heart risk improvements might have been gained from lowering the unhealthy fats from our diet was negated by a toxic overload of carbohydrates leading to the current widespread obesity epidemic.
The Mediterranean diet, the anti-inflammatory diet pyramid, a more plant-based diet and a healthy plate diet with increased vegetables, whole grains and fruits turns out to be the kind of diet your heart can live peacefully with. The occasional Big Mac and fries may not be fatal, and you don’t have to be a total vegetarian. More fish, olive oil, lean proteins, legumes and between five and 11 daily servings of fruits and vegetables all help diminish your heart risk.
If there were just one more thing I would encourage for heart health, it is to stop smoking. Smoking is like pouring gasoline on the fire of an inflammatory diet. It is even worse in the setting of diabetes, high cholesterol and hypertension. If you smoke, please stop.
Motivational interviewing techniques can help you identify ways to change your behavior. Medications, nicotine replacement, even hypnosis and acupuncture can have a role in this deadly addiction. Just this one change will yield huge benefits for your heart and also lower your cancer risk.
So to end this month’s heart theme: move, eat right, don’t smoke. Also, practice gratitude and forgiveness, extend your heart in meaningful service, and fill it with love.
Dr. Victor S. Sierpina is the W.D. and Laura Nell Nicholson Family Professor of Integrative Medicine and Professor of Family Medicine at UTMB.