Nearly half a million guys die from cardiovascular disease each year-more than the next eight leading causes of death combined.
Scary stuff, right? It doesn’t have to be. Quite simply, your cardiovascular system is an amazingly powerful and resilient engineering marvel. Consider the statistics: About the size of two clenched fists, your heart pumps roughly 21,000 gallons of blood a day. In a year, it will beat 3 million times; over 70 years, 2.5 billion times. Stretched end to end, the vessels of your circulatory system-arteries, capillaries, and veins-would measure 60,000 miles. Extremely compact, incredibly reliable, with horsepower to spare. It’s like having a Ferrari engine in a Volkswagen Beetle. If you allow yourself to look like a Volkswagen Beetle.
The main point, experts say, is to take care of your heart and it will take care of you. Abuse it and it will still take care of you-for a while. But let’s face it, even the finest piece of craftsmanship will succumb to abuse over time.
“What you really have to come to grips with is that what you’re putting into your body impacts how your heart and body function. It matters. What you do over the long run matters. How active you are, not one day but over the long run, really matters,” says Alice Lichtenstein, D.Sc, spokesperson for the American Heart Association and associate professor at the Jean Meyer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston.
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