Ways to Improve your Health
1) Flora Heart Health InformationYour heart is vital to your life. It pumps blood around your body, delivering oxygen and nutrients to all the cells in your body. The blood also carries all the waste products from your cells back to your liver, kidneys and lungs where they are processed and disposed from the body.
There are many things we can do to keep our hearts healthy and to reduce our risk of heart related health problems.
There are some things we cannot change and these include:
Age and gender: As we get older our risk of heart disease increases. Although there is some protection against heart disease in younger women, if youre post-menopausal, you may find that your cholesterol levels are slightly higher than they used to be and this could have an impact on the health of your heart. The good news is that for both men and women, CHD unlike many other serious conditions, can be prevented. Simply making small changes to your diet and lifestyle can drastically improve the health of your heart and the quality of your life.
Family medical history: You are at greater risk if one of your parents or a sibling has had a heart attack, has elevated blood cholesterol, has high blood pressure, diabetes or has angina (chest pain).
Diabetes: Diabetes is a risk factor for heart disease which you cant change but you can reduce your risk by eating a balanced diet, maintaining a healthy weight and exercising regularly.
Risk factors that you CAN change:
- Raised blood cholesterol (should be 5mmol/l or less. You can try to reduce this through dietary changes cut back on fat, especially saturated fats and eat more fruit, vegetables and fibre rich food).
- Smoking - Try to stop
- High blood pressure (Can be reduced by being a healthy weight, having moderate amounts of salt and alcohol in your diet and learning to manage stressful situations.)
- Lack of physical activity (Should aim for 30 min a day)
- Stress
- Being overweight
- Whether you eat a healthy diet
- How much alcohol you drink
Top Tips for reducing your Fat Intake & Improving your Heart Health
For those of you who have started training for the Flora Womens Mini Marathon, you will be making small changes to your diet to suit this active lifestyle. Congratulations - you are already on your way to improved fitness and a healthier heart!
Training for the Flora Womens Mini Marathon is one way to aim for a healthy body weight. Jogging for half an hour, for example, will burn around 200-250 calories depending on your body weight. The other way is to try skim some calories off your diet. Reducing your fat intake is a great way to do this because each gram of fat gives you 9 calories but remember some fat in the diet is essential and the healthiest fats called polyunsaturated fats come from vegetables and fish.
1) Watch how you cook: Try not to add a lot of fat while cooking, a little will go a long way. Grill instead of frying and bake or boil food instead of roasting.
2) Cut the fat off your meat: Go for lean cuts of meat where possible and only eat the lean part of the meat. Reduce your intake of fatty processed meats like sausages.
3) Watch your portion sizes: Treat foods that contain a lot of fat like cake and chocolate are allowed as part of a healthy diet. What matters is how often and in what portions you eat them. Reduce your portion sizes of fatty treat foods and try to have only one small treat a day.
4) Avoid creamy sauces on your pasta: Always go for tomato based sauces when eating out and ask for sauces and dressings on the side so that you can choose how much you eat.
5) Switch to low fat alternatives of your favourite foods: Go for low fat milk and spread, like Flora Light, look for low fat dressing and sauces in the supermarket and see if you can find low fat versions of treat foods like crisps and biscuits.
Heart Facts
- Your heart moves 2000 gallons of blood thats more than three super tankers - and pumps 100,000 times every day, 35 million times a year and over 2.5 billion times in an average lifetime
- Your system of blood vessels arteries veins and capillaries is over 60,000 miles long (long enough to go round the world more than twice), yet it takes just 20 seconds to pump blood throughout the entire vascular system
- In one day your blood travels 19,000km (12,000 miles), thats four times the distance across the USA from coast to coast
- Even at rest your heart works twice as hard as the leg muscles of a sprinting man
- Your heart is only as big as a clenched fist and weighs just 8 10 ounces
- The Aorta your main artery is almost as thick as a garden hose
- Your capillaries are so small that it takes ten of them to equal the thickness of a human hair.
Your heart is at the centre of everything you are and when its working well, it pumps blood through the arteries, delivering oxygen and essential nutrients. Its powerful and fragile at the same time, which is why Flora is committed to helping keep this precious and miraculous organ in good condition. With a background in heart health and over 40 years experience of developing heart healthy products, were dedicated to bringing you all the latest expert information to help you look after your heart and learn to love it.
