According to an article in Prevention Magazine, there are numerous reasons to stop eating red meat, many of which pertain to your heart health.
Here are the top 5 reasons to at least eat less red meat:
1. A compound found in red meat has been found to harden arteries.
2. Vegetarians tend to live longer. It’s possible that the cooking of red meat (charring) produces toxins which are then ingested.
3. “Pink Slime”. Red meat often contains an additive of fatty bits of leftover meat that is heated and then spun to remove the fat, and then is treated with an ammonia gas to kill bacteria.
4. Expensive cuts of meat are sometimes just smaller, lower quality cuts of meat that are “glued” together with transglutaminase. Ick.
5. The impact livestock has on our planet is significant. To produce a quarter pound of meat the following is required: 7 pounds of grain and forage, 53 gallons of drinking water and irrigating of feed crops, 75 square feet of grazing area, and 1,036 BTU’s for feed production and transport.
To read the article in its entirety, click here.
Thanks to a smartphone app called Pulse Point, a one-month old baby in Spokane, Washington is still alive.
A mechanic heard the alert tone on his phone, saw that the address where someone was in need of CPR was just two blocks away from where he was, and ran to the scene. He kept the infant alive until medical personnel arrived on scene.
The app allows citizens who are properly trained in CPR to be alerted when there is a medical emergency in their community. Not every community has access to this important advance in citizen-awareness/assistance yet but hopefully with more success stories like this, more communities will look at adopting the program.
Want a healthier heart? Walk faster, run harder.
To ward off metabolic syndrome (MS), working out longer isn’t the necessarily the best. It’s the intensity of the workout the matters most. MS is a combination of risk factors which include obesity and high blood pressure that increase your risk for cardiovascular disease, a new research in the BMJ Open shows.
Researchers found after gathering people’s baseline fitness habits for ten years that those who reported jogging or walking briskly for 2 to 4 hours a week cut their risk of developing MS by 35 to 50 percent.
High-intensity exercise versus light/moderate exercise has been a longstanding debate. This new study lends credence to the fact that high-intensity exercise is more beneficial in numerous ways.
Cardiologist Eric Topol, M.D., director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute and a Men’s Health expert advisor says, “Higher-intensity exercise does have a whole different impact on the body’s physiology. Everything is more pronounced: your heart rate is higher, your blood vessels are more dilated, and you’re revving up your cardiovascular system as you would a car”, Dr. Topol adds.
To see changes in your body, there is a threshold that you need to surpass. It’s likely that high-intensity exercise triggers those changes in lipid and glucose metabolism and blood pressure, lowering the risk factors that trigger MS, says David Maron, M.D., a cardiologist at Vanderbilt University’s medical center.
It is vital to your heart’s health to get your heartrate up to approximately 120 beats per minute (not heavy breathing but breathing heavier than normal) for the recommended 2.5 hours per week. This helps in reducing inflammation in the body which is thought to be a major contributing factor for developing heart disease. Don’t abandon your leisurely walk just yet, it, too, is beneficial!
A stroke happens when blood flow to a part of the brain stops. If blood flow is stopped for longer than a few seconds, the brain cannot get blood and oxygen. Brain cells can die, causing permanent damage.
There are two major types of stroke: ischemic stroke and hemorrhagic stroke.
Ischemic stroke occurs when a blood vessel that supplies blood to the brain is blocked by a blood clot. This may happen in two ways:
•A clot may form in an artery that is already very narrow. This is called a thrombotic stroke.
•A clot may break off from another place in the blood vessels of the brain, or from some other part of the body, and travel up to the brain. This is called cerebral embolism, or an embolic stroke.
Ischemic strokes may be caused by clogged arteries. Fat, cholesterol, and other substances collect on the artery walls, forming a sticky substance called plaque.
A hemorrhagic stroke occurs when a blood vessel in part of the brain becomes weak and bursts open, causing blood to leak into the brain. Some people have defects in the blood vessels of the brain that make this more likely.
Recognizing a stroke is easier than you may think. Remember this acronym:
Face
Arms
Speech
Time to call 911
This is a British PSA, obviously in the United States you should dial 911.
Do you know the difference in heart attack symptoms in men vs. in women?
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Each woman will present with different symptoms of a heart attack. Some women experience several symptoms while others show all symptoms. There are women who show no symptoms before their heart attack. The sooner you can recognize your symptoms and take appropriate action, the better. The symptoms to be aware of:
Discomfort, tightness,uncomfortable pressure, fullness, squeezing in the center of the chest lasting more than a few minutes, or comes and goes
Crushing chest pain
Pressure or pain that spreads to the shoulders, neck, upper back, jaw, or arms.
Dizziness or nausea
Clammy sweats, heart flutters, or paleness
Unexplained feelings of anxiety, fatigue or weakness – especially with exertion
Stomach or abdominal pain
Shortness of breath and difficulty breathing
Some women mistakenly think only crushing chest pain is a symptom of a heart attack and, therefore, delay seeking medical care. Others have found that healthcare providers have failed to recognize their heart attack symptoms by attributing the cause of symptoms to other health problems, such as indigestion. This is why it is so important to insist that the doctor or nurse administer an EKG test or an enzyme blood test to see if you are having a heart attack. Don’t be shy -it’s your heart and your life.
The odds of survival are much higher when more than one bystander comes to the rescue when someone suffers cardiac arrest in a public place, a new study suggests. CPR, or cardiopulmonary resuscitation, is a skill everyone should learn.
“Hands-only” CPR, just chest compressions and no mouth-to-mouth breathing, is sufficient for laypeople. When paramedics arrive they will take over with chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth. The American Heart Association and other such groups have shown that hands-only CPR is just as effective as the traditional way of CPR when it comes to helping adult cardiac arrest victims. The recommendations for children are different from that of adults.
Researches in Japan have found that among more than five thousand adults who suffered a cardiac incident outside of a hospital setting were more than twice as likely to survive when more than one person tried to help.
Six percent of victims were alive one year later when three or more “rescuers” were there, versus 3 percent when only one person came to their aid. When two people responded, the survival rate was 4 percent. The researchers do not know if all of those good Samaritans performed, or even knew, CPR.
Some may have just tried to help in some way, note the researchers, led by Dr. Hideo Inaba of Kanazawa University Graduate School of Medicine.
Dr. Michael Sayre, an associate professor of emergency medicine at Ohio State University in Columbus and current spokesman for the American Heart Association has stated that the more bystanders that respond to a cardiac victim the better.
“This study confirms the importance of bystanders responding to cardiac arrest, and the importance of early CPR,” Sayre told Reuters Health.
According to the AHA, more than 380,000 Americans go into cardiac arrest outside of a hospital setting each year. But most Americans have either not learned CPR at all, or their training has lapsed.
CPR classes are available, but the hands-only approach is easy enough to learn without formal training.
“You really don’t have to go to a class,” Sayre said.
He noted that the AHA website has video instructions on how to do hands-only CPR here: Click here for video.
“Learning CPR is something people often feel that they can put off,” Sayre said. “But you never know when you’ll be called on to act.”
Would you know what to do if someone in front of you collapsed? Could you provide aid until EMS arrived? This video has great information and is worth the 5 minutes to watch. Hands-only CPR, or Continuous Chest Compressions, which meets the guidelines for AHA HeartSaver CPR and First Aid Training. Continuous CPR ensures constant blood flow to the brain and heart which greatly increases the chances for survival. *Health care providers are still encouraged to do compressions with ventilations.
A new review shows that measuring your blood pressure in both arms may be the most effective way of detecting and catching a silent but really serious disease of the blood vessels. PAD, or peripheral artery disease, is a condition that involves narrowing of the arteries in the body’s extremities. The findings in the new study show that a difference in systolic blood pressure between the arms was linked to an increased risk of PAD.
Those patients who had a difference in their systolic blood pressure readings between their right or left arms of 15 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg) or more were more than two and a half times more likely to have PAD than those patients who had a smaller difference between their arms.
Early detection of PAD is important — while the majority of cases are silent, if the condition is detected, measures can be taken to reduce mortality from related cardiovascular disease.
Dr. Christopher Clark, of Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, the study researcher, claim that the findings support the need for it to be standard procedure to take blood pressure readings in both arms. Patients at a higher risk of PAD could be detected and further tests and/or treatment could be determined to help them.
The researchers reviewed 28 studies that measured blood pressure in both arms of participants. The studies typically included patients at increased risk of cardiovascular disease, the researchers noted.
In addition to an increased risk of PAD, a 15mm Hg blood pressure difference between arms was also associated with a 70 percent increased risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and a 60 percent increased risk of dying from any cause.
Which arm has the higher pressure can vary between individuals, but it is the size of the difference that counts, not which arm is higher and which is lower, the researchers said.
More work is needed to determine whether a substantial difference in blood pressure between arms should prompt aggressive management of cardiovascular risk factors, Richard McManus, of the University of Oxford, and Jonathan Mant, of the University of Cambridge, both in the United Kingdom, wrote in an editorial accompanying the study.
“Ascertainment of differences should become part of routine care, as opposed to a guideline recommendation that is mostly ignored,” McManus and Mant wrote.
Original artcile by: MyHealthNewsDaily Staff
Whether you’ve recently taken a CPR class and/or first aid training or you haven’t had a recertification class in years, the new app that iTunes offers is a must-have for smart phone users.
The app outlines the 2010 ECC guidlines for PALS, ACLS, BLS for health care providers, HeartSaver CPR classes and first aid.
This American Heart Association app incorporates instructional videos and HD graphics that clearly illustrate the most current techniques in CPR and first aid which have been proven to improve the chances of survival after a cardiac arrest, stroke, or major trauma.
To download the Pocket First Aid & CPR from the American Heart Association, you can click here.
If you don't find what you are looking for, feel free to contact me.
