How To Keep Your Heart Healthy

How To Keep Your Heart Healthy

Now I'm going to talk to you about how to keep your heart healthy.

There's several major components to keep in mind in keeping your heart healthy. As far as your nutrition is concerned, one of the major aspects is sodium or salt.

You want to really limit your sodium intake, sodium has been shown to increase blood pressure in a lot of people. So you want to make sure to keep your heart healthy, you keep your blood pressure normal. So for that reason, try to avoid using excessive amounts of processed foods, things like frozen dinners, canned soups, box dinners like macaroni and cheese or Rice-a-Roni.

Those tend to be very high in sodium. So you want as much as you can to actually prepare more of your own meals. Also really limit fast food, that tends to have a lot of excessive sodium in it. When you are cooking make sure you use just very small amounts of salt when you're actually preparing your food, and try not to add any additional salt once you've already prepared the food.

Another aspect of heart health is fat. Whenever you have fat you want to make sure it is the heart healthy kind of fat. Heart healthy fat is monounsaturated fat, for example fat in avocado, in olives, in olive oil or canola oil, or nuts or seeds.

Those are a lot of the sources of monounsaturated fats. Omega three fats are the other major polyunsaturated fat that is very heart healthy, and omega three fats are found primarily in seafood, also in small amounts in nuts and seeds, eggs may have some omega three fats in them, as well as flax seed. So the healthy fats as well as low sodium, those are two major things to keep in mind.

A third major thing is potassium. Potassium actually helps counterbalance sodium, so you want to make sure you're getting a lot of high potassium foods. Some sources of high potassium include fruits such as apricots, cantaloupe, oranges and bananas.

ther items - avocados actually have a lot of potassium in them, potatoes, tomato sauce, and from the dairy group, yogurt and milk. So there's a wide variety foods that you include that have a lot of potassium. So try to have a lot of potassium, limit your sodium, include your healthy fats, nutrition-wise those are the major aspects for your heart health.

The other component is physical activity, you want to make sure that you're doing some type of aerobic or cardiovascular activity, something that gets your heart beating a little bit faster, so that will be things like walking, jogging, cycling, swimming, all of those activities will strengthen your heart muscle.

Major things to keep in mind again, your physical activity, nutrition wise, healthy fats, low sodium and high potassium.

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