Your Heart’s Journey: Knowledge is Power During Heart Health Month
On average, someone in the US dies of cardiovascular disease every 34 seconds. February is Heart Health Month, and this statistic is a compelling reason to use this time for your benefit. Your heart and blood vessels form an intricate system designed to keep you going for a lifetime. So why does heart disease remain the country’s leading cause of death – year after year?
First, it’s important to understand how your cardiovascular system is put together and what it does. This system has three main jobs, all dependent on keeping your blood moving. The first task is delivering oxygen from your lungs to all your cells. At the same time, it delivers a complex mix of nutrients from food. Finally, your blood carries toxic waste products, including carbon dioxide, to be eliminated before they build to life-endangering levels. As a bonus, the blood also transports vital hormones and immune system cells around the body.
Your heart – the “cardio” part of cardiovascular - is the pump that keeps blood moving. Your blood vessels – the “vascular” component – include your arteries, veins, and capillaries. Arteries carry blood away from your heart, while veins carry blood from all parts of your body back to the heart. Capillaries are in the middle – where blood ends its outbound journey, and moves into veins for the trip back. Capillaries are tiny tubes, with some having a width less than that of a human hair. Thin capillary walls allow nutrients, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and other cardiovascular cargo to move into and out of the blood.
Researchers estimate the length of your blood vessels totals 60,000 miles! The heart must be powerful to squeeze blood through 60,000 miles to service every cell in your body. So you might think the heart is the most important part of your cardiovascular system.
Here’s the thing – each part of this system is dependent on the other parts. Choosing one piece as “most important” is not how it works. Yes, the blood in your vessels is going nowhere if the heart does not pump and push it along.
Yet the heart itself cannot function without a continuous supply of nourishing blood, which it gets from blood vessels that run (you guessed it) from one part of the heart to all the other cells in the heart. In other words, when your heart pumps, it feeds itself through a critical network of blood vessels. That’s one of the many reasons that it’s vital to make healthy lifestyle choices. What you eat, whether you smoke, how much you exercise, and many other choices powerfully influence the health of your blood vessels – including the vessels that feed your heart!
When you appreciate the amazing design of your body, you can respect it, and commit to lifestyle choices to support top functioning. February is Heart Health Month – use it to learn more about what your best choices are. And even take steps to make those best choices – including a whole food, plant-based diet – every day.
If you’re in San Diego, you can easily get healthy food to support your cardiovascular function. Plant Based Meals is a meal prep company offering delicious whole-food, plant-based choices every week. Your food is delivered fresh, never frozen, for outstanding taste and maximum nutrition. Their tempting selection of meals changes weekly. Eating whole food, plant-based has never been more convenient.
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Post written by Janice Stanger, Ph.D. Janice authored The Perfect Formula Diet: How to Lose Weight and Get Healthy Now With Six Kinds of Whole Foods. She is a nutrition educator, author, and speaker.
This is an educational article and does not provide medical advice. Results cannot be guaranteed, and may vary from person to person.