Avoid THIS Countdown to Heart Disease

Heart disease boils down to a numbers game.

The number of your blood pressure.

The number of your lipid levels.

The number on the scale.

But now there’s another number you should be thinking about: TIME.

Researchers recommend that you set a timer every HOUR to reduce your risk of a heart attack.

Let me explain.

They recently looked at data on a group of folks who wore accelerometers to measure their physical activity and sedentary time.

They wanted to figure out their impact on heart disease risk factors.

You probably already know where this is going…

Unsurprisingly, the team found that older folks who were more active had fewer incidents of heart disease and early death. And it didn’t matter how strenuous that activity was.

After all the data crunching, the research boiled down to two main findings:

• For every additional 10 minutes of daily activity, there was a 6.5 percent DROP in mortality risk.
• For every additional 10 minutes of sedentary time, there was a 5.6 percent INCREASE in mortality risk.

We already know that a sedentary lifestyle is bad for your heart and your health, of course.

But the new findings highlight that it isn’t just moving more that’s important. You must avoid long periods of sitting.

In other words, you need to get MOVING consistently. Try breaking up every hour of sitting with a 10-minute movement break.

Now, don’t worry. You don’t always have to do traditional “exercise” during each activity block. Simply keep moving.

Everything from taking a 10-minute stroll to doing household chores will do the trick.

Obviously, if you’re sitting down to watch Yellowstone or Longmire in the evenings, you don’t have to be TOO strict about the hour window. Although, if your show has commercial breaks, you can get up and move during them.

But for the rest of the day, consider setting a timer to remind you once an hour to get up for another movement break.

P.S. Every decision you make throughout the day can impact your heart health. CLICK HERE to discover 13 (often surprising) ways to protect your heart.

SOURCE:

“Cardiovascular disease risk and all-cause mortality associated with accelerometer-measured physical activity and sedentary time ‒ a prospective population-based study in older adults.” BMC Geriatr 22, 729 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12877-022-03414-8