| Posted February 19, 2015 | By Brent Anderson, M.D. | Categorized under Men's Health, Women's Health |

Heart disease is the No. 1 killer in America, and although there are some risk factors you can't really change, such as family history, there are also a number of risk factors that are modifiable and can change the outcome of your health.

Smoking

The first thing I tell my patients is they have to quit smoking. That's the biggest modification we need to make. If you are a smoker, then you are at risk of heart disease and stroke.

If a patient does nothing else but quit smoking, that's probably the biggest benefit you can give your body. Smoking is hard to give up. It takes people on average 8 to 9 times of trying to stop and starting back. That's the natural progression of how people quit. Each time you go through that cycle, your chances of success go up.

Know your numbers

The next best way to know if you are at risk is to know your blood pressure and cholesterol. Only about half of the people who have high blood pressure know they have it. That's why it is known as the silent killer.

The nice thing about blood pressure and cholesterol, I have found in my own experience with patients, is those are things that can be monitored. It gives a patient something attainable they can look at and see if they've made progress toward something helping them long term.

Lifestyle change

The biggest misconception about heart disease is that I don't think people have a good firm grasp on how much your lifestyle really affects your risk. As a physician, we have to educate the patient that it's more about small pieces that contribute to a high risk. We generally can't point to one single "a ha" thing that explains why they will have heart disease in the future.

So we have to first identify those patients who have high blood pressure, high cholesterol or who smoke. The next tier of identifying risks is to find those overweight individuals who have pre-diabetes or diabetes.

We as cardiologists look at patients now as well as their lives a decade or two down the road so we can see what we can do now to affect positive changes in their health and reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease in the future.

Obesity epidemic

There has been a steady decrease in the incidence of cardiovascular disease since the mid ‘60s when the first studies began appearing about the dangers of smoking and the number of smokers greatly decreased. But we've also had an explosion of obesity over the last 15 to 20 years. Instead of continuing to make the strides we've made in medicine, there is real concern that we will lose some of the ground we have gained due to the cardiovascular risk associated with obesity.

You look from the ‘50s onward and there has been a slow and steady increase in obesity of this country. The foods we eat are high in calories but low in nutritional content.  That, combined with a more sedentary lifestyle creates the perfect storm for weight gain and obesity and all of the different and problems that stem from that.

So what can people do to change bad habits? Do what your grandma used to tell you. Eat your fruits and veggies and get out and play.

Get up and move

The best way for sedentary people to look at exercise is in baby steps. For example, take the stairs instead of the elevator. The more walking one does the better. It doesn't even have to be super high intensity, either. I tell people if you can speak one or two sentences that's a good pace. If you could sing an entire song, you need to work a little harder.

A minimum recommendation is 150 minutes of exercise a week. That's about 20 minutes a day. It doesn't even have to be done all at one time, either. Break it up into segments.

What's the best kind of exercise to do? One that you enjoy, so that you will stick with it. If you don't like the stationary bike, don't invest in one because you will get tired of it and end up hanging your laundry on it.