How to keep your heart healthy

What is there to know about the heart? Perhaps, it is not that important to know how it looks like and how it works, but the question that everyone should know the answer to is how to keep your heart healthy.

Structure of the heart

Heart is a muscle organ that is consisted of four cavities, two atriums and two ventricles through which the blood flows thanks to the pumping ability of the heart. This continual heart activity enables blood to flow through the entire body and perform its function (exchange the nutrients and gases that participate in the breathing process). This non-stop process is enabled with the electrical impulses that come from the heart itself, the so-called AV nod. Problems that might occur in a heart are related to the obstruction of blood flowing from atriums to ventricles, in and out of the heart. Also, the muscle itself can be damaged or it can subdue to degeneration.

Keeping a healthy heart

There are two major methods for keeping a heart healthy. Those are normal, healthy eating and exercises. Eating healthy might be even more important, because the problems caused by excessive eating simply cannot be eliminated with physical activity. Built up cholesterol can cause arterial problems and of course, there are arteries in the heart too, called coronary arteries, and they are used to feed the heart muscle with much needed nutrients. Also, increased blood pressure might be the reason for blood flow to become irregular and that can also cause problems for a normal heart functioning. Bad eating habits, including overeating or eating junk food, lead to obesity, which means that fat tissue in the organism is heavily increased. Extra weight puts additional strain on the heart, because it got used to deal with a moderate, normal weight. Some of the conditions that might happen because of the poor heart treating are heart attack, heart insufficiency, angina pectoris etc.

As for the exercises, the heart has more benefits from light exercises that last longer but with less strain on the body. How is this done? Walking and jogging could be the perfect examples of what heart actually needs. Those activities should not raise the heart rate too much, they should involve the entire body, but it is not hard at all. Another thing should be mentioned as something that can prevent heart issues, and that is stress reduction in life. Sadly, this is something that most people simply cannot achieve.