The Prime Risk Factors Of Developing Heart Disease

The Prime Risk Factors Of Developing Heart Disease

In the United States, heart disease is the number of cause of deaths by illness. And, for the most part, this is avoidable because heart disease is largely impacted by your lifestyle choices.

What are the risk factors associated with developing heart disease? Obviously, a prime one is hereditary. That, you have no control of. But, there are a number of risk factors which you do have a degree of control over. The major risk factors include cigarette smoking, over eating, and level of physical fitness. And, while all of these are important, your level of physical fitness, or the amount of exercise that you get, seems to have the most effect on your odds of developing coronary heart and blood vessel problems.

The problem can be reduced to one word - atherosclerosis. Basically, this is a situation where arterial walls in the body gradually begin to narrow as they become clogged with plaque. Research has shown that, in the U.S., because of our poor food and exercise habits, this accumulation of plaque, or fatty deposits, begins to develop in the teen years.

In addition, many studies have demonstrated that if someone starts a program designed to limit the amount of calories that he takes in while increasing the amount of physical activity that he engages in, atherosclerosis can be dramatically slowed down and sometimes even reversed.

There is one study, in particular, that demonstrated this. And that is a study performed at Harvard nearly ten years ago, was able to assign specific ratios to the amount of mortality risk based on the amount of exercise that you did.

So, for instance, assuming that you were to engage in enough physical activity, during a week's time, that burned 0 to 1,000 calories, your mortality risk ratio was basically left unchanged. If the amount of activity you engaged in burned one thousand to twenty five hundred calories during the week, your mortality risk decreased to just under 75% of the average population. And if you exercised enough to burn twenty five hundred calories or more, your mortality risk decreased to almost fifty percent of those who exercised little or not at all.

As they look into the data in greater detail, a clearer picture begin to emerge. It seems that the decrease in mortality was mainly due to two factors. One is that those who exercised more, generally were able to keep their weight down as well. And, since excess weight is one of the prime factors that lead to premature hardening of the arteries, keeping the weight down naturally helped.

And, the researchers discovered that exercise did one other thing as well. It resulted in a marked increase in the flexibility of the arteries and blood vessels flowing through the body. This meant that the heart did not have to work as hard to pump blood through the body. The lesson is clear to all who care to listen. If you want to lessen your chance of heart disease - exercise more.

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