World Heart Day 2018: 4 heart healthy tips for you

Dr Santosh Kumar Dora, Senior Cardiologist, Asian Heart Institute, lists out 4 vital tips to keep your heart in top shape. Don't forget to follow them.

Adopting a healthy diet and exercise is good for your heart. Today, due to stress, faulty eating habits and due to the lack of physical activity one can easily suffer from various heart ailments. So, if you want to keep your heart healthy just take care of it. Dr Santosh Kumar Dora, Senior Cardiologist, Asian Heart Institute, tells you how.

1. Smoking Cessation: Smoking can cause heart disease or lung cancer like serious life-threatening illness. If you are smoking, then you should quit it as soon as possible. The risk of heart attack increases in smokers. In the presence of other risk factors like diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia the risk of heart disease increases many folds. The risk of heart attack reduces by half of that of smokers at the end of one year once a person stops smoking. When are you giving up smoking?
2. You should exercise regularly: Regular aerobic exercise keeps the heart healthy. American Heart Association has recommended 150 minutes of moderate exercise in a week. It can be brisk walking, jogging, swimming, cycling and so on. This can be achieved by doing exercise for at least 30 minutes every day for at least five days a week.
3. You should maintain an ideal body weight: Overweight brings a lot of health problems including heart disease. Being overweight can increase the risk of hypertension and diabetes that in turn again increase the risk of heart disease. One should maintain his weight as per the ideal body mass index. The BMI can be calculated as per the follows. BMI: weight (kg)/height in m2.
4. Follow a well-balanced diet: Healthy diet: Heart-healthy diet is that which contains less fat and more fibre. Saturated fats like ghee should be avoided. One should take more of fruits and vegetables. Some of the fibre-rich foods are bread, bran, oats, wholegrain cereals, skinned potatoes, fruits, vegetables etc. Nonvegetarians should eat more of chicken and fish rather than mutton and prawns to avoid cholesterol.