Amazing Heart Facts

The mamallian heart, particularly the human heart, is one incredible machine. Electrically pulsed and timed, kept going by an ever vigilant "sympathetic" nerve system; your heart does more work than you could possibly imagine in a typical day. Consider what it has to do over the course of a life time:

1. An adult heart is about the size of two fists. For a kid, it's the size of one fist.
   
2. The human heart beats 100,000 times in ONE DAY! 35 million times in one year. If you live to be 65, your heart will have beaten 2,275,000,000 times. 
   
3. Try squeezing a tennis ball very hard. That's the kind of contraction your heart makes on every beat. Your heart works harder than your leg muscles on a person running, that's when the heart is at rest. 
   
4. The human adult body has about 5.6 liters (6 quarts) of blood. All of this blood circulates through the entire body 3 times/minute. In one day, your blood travels 19,000 km (12,000 miles)-4 times the distance between New York and Los Angeles. Remember, every day it does this.
   
5. For every extra pound of fat we carry around, the body creates 2 miles of capillaries to feed that tissue. The heart must pump blood through that extra distance on each and every beat, We call this "peripheral resistance."
   
6. The aorta is the largest artery in the body. It is almost the diameter of a garden hose. Capillaries, conversely, are so small that it would take 10 of them to equal the thickness of a human hair.

So, what are we trying to say here? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over one million Americans die every year from the various forms of heart disease. It is far and away, the biggest killer of Americans every year and it's getting worse. These numbers significantly overtake all the deaths of cancer. The United States has become obese. We, as a group, are overweight and it is killing us. Heart Disease is the leading cause of death for men and women. Because men tend to develope heart disease 10 to 15 years earlier than women, they're more likely to die of it in the prime of life. About 25% of all heart related disease deaths occur in men between 35 and 65. That's right, 35. Prevention, once again, is the key to defense against this silent killer. Recommendations for prevention include: keeping your weight down, eat a varied diet rich in fruits, vegitables and low fat foods, get 30 minutes of exercise a day, keep cholesterol levels down, control your blood sugar, keep your blood pressure down, don't smoke or use any other tobacco products.

Ask us about preventive care, exercise and what is called the "whole-istic" approach to health; that is to say, taking a look at the whole body, the whole lifestyle and all the things that we do day to day and deciding what needs to be changed.