Heart

What foods should I eat to help prevent heart disease and stroke?

You should eat mainly:

• Fruits and vegetables
• Grains (at least half of your grains should be whole grains, such as whole wheat, whole oats, oatmeal, whole-grain corn, brown rice, wild rice, whole rye, whole-grain barley, buckwheat, bulgur, millet, quinoa, and sorghum)
• Fat-free or low-fat versions of milk, cheese, yogurt, and other milk products
• Fish, skinless poultry, lean meats, dry beans, eggs, and nuts
• Polyunsaturated (pol-ee-uhn-SACH-uh-ray-tid) and monounsaturated (mon-oh-uhn-SACH-uh-ray-tid) fats (found in fish, nuts, and vegetable oils)

Also, you should limit the amount of foods you eat that contain:

• Saturated fat (found in foods such as fatty cuts of meat, whole milk, cheese made from whole milk, ice cream, sherbet, frozen yogurt, butter, lard, cakes, cookies, doughnuts, sausage, regular mayonnaise, coconut, palm oil)
• Trans fat (found mainly in processed foods such as cakes, cookies, crackers, pies, stick or hard margarine, potato chips, corn chips)
• Cholesterol (koh-LESS-tur-ol) (found in foods such as liver, chicken and turkey giblets, pork, sausage, whole milk, cheese made from whole milk, ice cream, sherbet, frozen yogurt)
• Sodium (found in salt and baking soda)
• Added sugars (such as corn syrup, corn sweetener, fructose, glucose, sucrose, dextrose, lactose, maltose, honey, molasses, raw sugar, invert sugar, malt syrup, syrup, caramel, and fruit juice concentrates)

Eating lots of saturated fat, trans fat, and cholesterol may cause plaque buildup in your arteries. Eating lots of sodium may cause you to develop high blood pressure, also called hypertension. Eating lots of added sugars may cause you to develop type 2 diabetes. Both hypertension and diabetes increase your risk of heart disease and stroke

Heart Disease Awareness for Women

you may be  be surprised by this fact: Coronary heart disease, not cancer, is by far the leading cause of death among women in the United States. More woman die from heart disease than from all forms of cancer combined. Although so many women are at risk, especially women after menopause, few recognize the risk factors and take steps to reduce them. If left untreated, coronary heart disease leads to heart attack and heart failure.

Women can do many things to reduce their risk of developing coronary heart disease:

• stop smoking
• maintain a weight as close to their ideal body weight as possible
• exercise (the American Heart Association recommends 20 minutes of exercise three times a week with warm up and cool down periods)
• seek screening and treatment for high blood pressure, diabetes or high cholesterol

 New techniques:-

Scientists, including one of Indian-origin, have developed a new technique that can be used to convert cells from heart disease patients into heart muscle cells to act as a personalised treatment for their condition. Researchers have previously reported the ability to convert scar-forming cells in the heart (called fibroblasts) into new, beating muscle in mice that had experienced heart attacks, thereby regenerating a heart from within. They accomplished this by injecting a combination of three genes into the animals' fibroblast cells.

"This gene therapy approach resulted in new cardiac muscle cells that beat in synchrony with neighbouring muscle cells and ultimately improved the pumping function of the heart," said senior author Dr Deepak Srivastava of the Gladstone Institutes and its affiliate, the University of California, San Francisco.

In the new study, Srivastava and his colleagues coaxed fibroblasts from human foetal heart cells, embryonic stem cells, and newborn skin grown in the lab to become heart muscle cells using a slightly different combination of genes, representing an important step toward the use of this technology for regenerative medicine. The team envisions that introducing these genes into damaged hearts by gene therapy might convert fibroblasts into new muscle, thereby improving the function of the heart.

"Over 50 per cent of the cells in the human heart are fibroblasts, providing a vast pool of cells that could be harnessed to create new muscle," said Srivastava. However, additional research is needed to improve the process of reprogramming adult human cells in this way. The research was published in the journal of the International Society of Stem Cell Research, Stem Cell Reports, published by Cell Press.

Types, Prevention & Treatments :-

As can be expected from an organ responsible for getting blood throughout the body, the root of heart disease is when that blood flow is blocked.

Symptoms and Types

Coronary artery disease is the most common type of heart disease in the U.S., according to the CDC. It occurs when cholesterol builds up in arteries — called plaque — narrowing the space blood can flow through, a condition called atherosclerosis. Ultimately, the narrowing can build up enough to cause chest pain and shortness of breath — called angina, or it can block the vessel completely, causing a heart attack. Over one million Americans suffer heart attacks each year, according to the American Heart Association.

Diagnosis and Tests

Five symptoms can indicate when someone is having a heart attack and requires immediate emergency care. These include pain in the jaw, neck or back; pain in the arms or shoulder; chest pain; lightheadedness or weakness; and shortness of breath.

A number of factors play a role in heart disease risk. Some include family history and age (if your relatives have heart disease or you are older, your risk goes up), but others you have more control over.

Much of the advice to avoid heart disease is the same health advice given for other conditions: stop smoking, exercise and eat a diet that is low in cholesterol and salt — cholesterol being the source of blockage and salt contributing to higher blood pressure. Other things to avoid in the diet include saturated fats, which typically come from animal fats and oils, and trans fats, which occur in vegetable oil, but have largely been removed from the marketplace because of consumer demand.

According to the NIH, diabetes is a condition that can increase heart disease risk by as much as 100 percent, as the higher levels of glucose in the blood that are characteristic of diabetes can leave fatty deposits in blood vessels, which, like cholesterol plaques, can cause blockage of the heart

Prevention

In addition to lifestyle changes, some treatments are available to help avoid heart disease. Many of these medications are designed to lower cholesterol.

There are two types of cholesterol. The first, LDL, is called “bad cholesterol” because it is the type that can build up and block blood vessels. The other, HDL, is called “good cholesterol” because it is responsible for transporting LDL to the liver, ultimately removing it from the blood stream.

Optimally, HDL cholesterol levels should be above 40 (measured in milligrams per deciliter of blood) and LDL cholesterol should be below 100, according to the CDC.

The FDA has approved a number of drugs for improving cholesterol levels. Perhaps the best known are statins. They slow cholesterol production by the liver and speed up how fast it removed LDL cholesterol from the bloodstream.

Another class of drug to lower cholesterol is called bile acid sequestrants. These drugs remove bile acids from the body. Because the body produces these acids from LDL cholesterol, more LDL cholesterol will be broken down to replace them.

Niacin and fibrates are other drug classes for improving cholesterol levels. Both increase HDL cholesterol, and niacin lowers LDL cholesterol.

Treatments

Surgical options can also treat heart disease. Coronary angioplasty is performed over one million times each year on patients in the United States, according to the NIH. In this procedure, a balloon is threaded into the affected blood vessel and inflated, pushing the plaque blocking the artery to the sides of the vessel. Sometimes, this procedure is accompanied by placement of a stent — a mesh tube designed to hold the blood vessel open.

Despite all that is known about it, heart disease is the leading cause of death in both men and women in the United States, according to the CDC, claiming over 630,000 lives in 2006 — more than a quarter of all deaths.

What not to 'EAT' n what not to 'DO'

Eat LESS of these foods:
Sugar and flour from:
candy and sweets, pastries, cookies, ice cream, and refined- grain breads, pastas, crackers, and baked goods.
Don't drink sugar.
Avoid soda , energy drinks or fruit drinks .
Animal fats.
o Eat less meat, poultry skin, cheese, butter, high fat milk and yogurt, and ice cream.
Hydrogenated fats.
o Avoid fried foods. o Choose packaged foods that do not contain hydrogenated oils.
Inflammatory oils.
o Avoid "vegetable", corn, soy, sunflower, and cottonseed, oils. o Choose packaged foods, salad dressings, and mayonnaise that do not contain these oils.
Alcohol.
Limit to 1-2 servings or less daily.
DON'T SMOKE!
Smoking is one of the worst habits for your heart, and your entire body. It not only increases the risk for heart disease but it dramatically increases your risk of actually having a attack or stroke. 

What to 'EAT' n what to 'DO'

Exercise nearly every day for at least 30 minutes.
Eat vegetables and fruits with every meal and snack.
Look a variety of colors from vegetables and fruits on your plate!
Eat beans or lentils nearly every day for a fiber boost.
Choose unprocessed carbohydrate rich foods like, brown rice, sweet potatoes, oatmeal and beans instead of pasta, bread, crackers and other flour based foods.
Look for whole grain cereals with >3 grams fiber and <6 grams sugar per 100 calories.
Eat nuts & seeds , like pistachios, walnuts, almonds, and pecans, pumpkin seeds and nut butters, every day.
Choose "healthy" fat -rich foods such as olive oil, canola oil, nuts, seeds, olives, and avocado regularly.
Eat fish once or twice a week. Emphasize oily fish like salmon, tuna, sardines, or herring.
Consider taking a fish oil supplement.
Consider taking a plant stanol supplement.
Choose small portions of food and eat more often rather than eating larger meals less frequently.
Use herbs, spices , lemon, vinegars, onions and garlic instead of salt to flavor foods.
Get enough sleep .