Emily Sohn
EAT better, drink less, exercise more, sleep enough: It’s common advice for heart health – and it’s frequently ignored.
But a major lifestyle overhaul isn’t the only way to help your heart, studies suggest. Even small changes can make substantial differences.
Eventually, little changes add up, says David Goff, director of the cardiovascular sciences division at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, US. “Any small change you make in a positive direction is good. It’s not an all-or-nothing phenomenon.”
Physical activity is a perfect example, Goff says. Official guidelines, which recommend 30 minutes of moderately intense activity on most days, are based partly on evidence of substantial health benefits from doing 150 to 300 minutes of exercise each week, according to a 2011 review study by researchers at the University of South Carolina at Columbia. Those benefits include reduced risks of coronary heart disease, stroke and high blood pressure.
But the guidelines also come out of an assessment of what is obtainable for most people, Goff adds. And while it would be ideal to get at least 150 minutes of exercise weekly, getting less than that also has benefits. When the researchers looked at deaths from all causes, they saw the sharpest drop in mortality when exercise jumped from half-an-hour to an hour-and-a-half each week.
Just getting up for a minute or two to interrupt bouts of sitting may also improve health, the study noted. And moving for as little as eight minutes a few times a day provides the same cardiovascular benefits as 30 uninterrupted minutes.
“If you can’t find 30 minutes a day, try to find five or 10 or 15. Anything is better than nothing.” The “some is better than none” philosophy applies to dietary improvements, too, Goff says. According to the National Institutes of Health, an ideal meal plan includes lots of fruit, vegetables and whole grains, with limited amounts of fatty meat and tropical oils. But eating an imperfect diet with more of the good stuff is better than giving up entirely. That’s a conclusion from a 2016 study that created food-quality scores from the self-reported diets of about 200000 people. Over about 25 years, the study found, people whose diets scored lowest had a 13% higher risk of coronary artery disease MOVE: A little exercise is better than nothing. than did people in the secondworst group.
Switching out sugar-sweetened beverages helps to cut several hundred calories a day and control weight. That helps lower blood pressure, levels of harmful cholesterol and the potential for diabetes – all risk factors for heart disease. Large long-term studies have shown that people who average one sugary drink a day have a 20% higher risk of heart attack than people who rarely drink any.
It’s not just food and diet, adds Michael Miller, director of the Center for Preventive Cardiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Heart strength can also come from battling stress by boosting emotional health in simple and unexpected ways, he says, such as a good laugh. In a small 2005 study, Miller played movie clips for 20 people. When participants watched a scene that made them laugh, 19 experienced dilation of the blood vessels. A stressful scene led to constriction in 14 viewers. Since then, Miller says, other studies have found similar results, including one showing that vessels stayed dilated for 24 hours. Dilation allows more blood to flow, decreasing blood pressure and heart rate. – The Washington Post