Heart Disease Prevention Tips

Dr. Suzanne Sorof shares three heart disease prevention tips for women.

Ladies, I’d like to give you three tips on preventing heart disease. The number one is prevention. It’s controlling your blood pressure, getting good exercise and eating right so that you don’t develop problems such as high cholesterol and diabetes. Well, there are certain things that we can’t control in our bodies and certain things that we cannot. We obviously can’t control our age or the genetics that our parents have given us. So the things that we can control are if you have high blood pressure, you want to keep it as low as possible and the goal is to be less than 120 over 80. The other things we can’t control are the cholesterol levels because that’s also a genetic predisposition. So the goal for that would be to eat heart healthy diet such as a Mediterranean diet, those low and saturated fats, foods such as plant fats, olive oil, salmon, those are nice fishes with fatty oils in them. You want to have a lot of vegetables that are high in plant sterol such as salads, lettuces, things that don’t require your body to store cholesterol. Those that will help you keep your cholesterol levels down and the goal for your cholesterol would be to be less than 100 for your bad cholesterol which is the L-type cholesterol. If you already have heart disease the goal is less than 70, so the lower, the better. The last thing we know that people can do is exercise, because daily exercise raises your good cholesterol which is very heart protective. Not only does it do that it lowers the bad cholesterol because it speeds your metabolism up in order for you to metabolize those foods that you’ve eaten. So it helps you in many ways other than just exercising your heart muscle, and those are my three tips for prevention of heart disease.