It's certainly not new advice: eat better, exercise more, manage your weight, limit alcohol, and don't smoke to help ward off heart disease. Even just making one lifestyle change can lower your risk. But it's advice worth repeating.
Two studies, published in today's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association underscore the importance of adopting a healthy lifestyle. The findings: Adhering to a combination of low-risk lifestyle behaviours can dramatically reduce your odds of developing high blood pressure and heart failure.
In the first study, researchers from Boston followed 83,882 healthy women, aged 27 to 44, for 14 years to examine the relationship between six lifestyle and diet factors and the risk of being diagnosed with hypertension. These factors included having a body mass index of less than 25, 30 minutes of daily vigorous exercise, modest alcohol intake (less than one drink per day), use of non-prescription pain killers (i.e. aspirin, acetaminophen) less than once per week, taking 400 micrograms of folic acid, and a diet that closely matched the DASH diet.
The DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet is low in saturated fat and emphasizes fruit, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts and low-fat dairy products, food choices high in fibre, calcium, magnesium and potassium – nutrients linked with lower blood pressure.
All six lifestyle factors have been previously linked with loweringthe risk of developing hypertension, and many have been shown to reduce elevated blood pressure. When each factor was assessed individually, body mass index was the most powerful predictor of hypertension.
Women with a BMI of 30 or greater were almost five times more likely to develop high blood pressure than were those with a BMI of less than 23. (BMI is calculated as your weight in kilograms divided by the square of your height in meters. For adults, a BMI of 25 or more signals overweight; 30 or more indicates obesity.)
Adhering to a combination of low-risk factors offered even greater protection; the more low-risk factors women had, the lower their risk for hypertension. Women who were low risk for three factors – healthy BMI, daily vigorous exercise, and a DASH-style diet – had a 54 per cent reduced risk of high blood pressure. Adding a modest alcohol intake into the equation – four low-risk factors – reduced the risk by 72 per cent. Women who had all six low-risk factors were 80 per cent less likely to develop high blood pressure compared to those who lacked them.
The researchers also estimated how many cases of newly diagnosed hypertension could have been avoided had all women in the study adhered to a combination of healthy behaviours. If all women were low risk for all six factors, an estimated 78 per cent of new cases of hypertension could have been prevented. Had all the women had a healthy BMI, exercised daily and followed a healthy diet, one-half of all new cases could have been averted.
The second study included data from 20,900 healthy men who were followed for 22 years to assess the impact of six healthy habits on the lifetime risk of heart failure, which is usually preceded by risk factors such as high blood pressure, heart attack, diabetes and obesity.
Your lifetime risk of a disease is the risk of ever developing it during your remaining lifetime. It's estimated that one in every five adults aged 40 will succumb to heart failure in their remaining years.
In this study, men who exercised regularly, drank modestly, did not smoke, who were not overweight and had a diet that included breakfast cereal (at least once per week) and fruits and vegetables (at least four daily servings) had a lower lifetime risk of heart failure.
