Improve Your Heart Health With This Checklist
If you’re looking to reduce your chances of dying early from a heart attack or stroke, you’ve likely heard of several ways to do it: exercise more , eat “good fats,” perhaps look at the heart health metrics on your smartwatch . But there are many things that should be good for our hearts, and sometimes it gets a little hard to know where to start.
Fortunately, the American Heart Association has a tool that breaks down your personal and lifestyle risk factors into eight categories. While AHA already had a similar seven-point model, they just released an updated version called “Life’s Essential 8” so named because they added sleep as a factor. There is an online quiz that makes it easy to find out where you are.
The categories they consider include the following:
- Sleep . Adults need seven to nine hours of sleep each night, children more.
- The impact of nicotine . It used to be “smoking”, but nicotine vapes count too.
- Physical activity . We should all do at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise (walking counts ) or vigorous exercise that counts double. Children should get an hour a day.
- Diet . A heart-healthy diet is defined here as a diet high in fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, and fish.
- Weight . The AHA acknowledges that BMI is “not perfect” but since you’re filling out an online form, they need some simple metric to guess your body composition. They consider a BMI below 25 a good sign of heart health.
- blood glucose . The tool will ask for your last test result for either fasting blood glucose or hemoglobin a1c (which shows what your blood glucose has been for a longer period of time).
- Cholesterol . Calculation of total and non-HDL cholesterol for this element.
- Blood pressure . Ideally you should be below 128/80.
If you just want a rough idea of where you are, you can probably skim through this list and say, “Oh. Yeah. I see where I’m failing.” For more information, click on the My Life Check tool (free, but registration required) and answer the questions.
Most of them are pretty simple, but when I got to the diet questionnaire, I thought, wait. They want to know how many servings of vegetables I eat per week? How many servings do I have per week? (There are similar questions for other foods, including fruits, beans, red meat, fish/seafood, butter, and sweets.) I assumed I could, and then moved on. It also took me a while to count the number of minutes of exercise in a typical week.
One annoying thing about this tool is that it requires you to enter a value for your cholesterol and blood glucose test results. I didn’t have these values handy, so I had to invent them to be able to click on the next screen.
In the end, you get a numerical score from 0 to 100. I did very well – 93.8. My fake lab values must have been good! The eight points above are presented under two headings depending on how you did it: what needs to be “improved” and what needs to be “celebrated”. I, for one, don’t smoke and mostly live in the gym, so smoking and physical activity was a holiday for me. On the other hand, I have to eat too many pastries and not enough vegetables because my diet was listed as a thing that needs to be improved.
The average American would score about 65 , according to the AHA. They consider anything below 50 to be “poor” heart health, and anything above 80 to be “high.”
As always, we shouldn’t base important life decisions on an online quiz. But if you’re trying to figure out what’s most important, a tool like this can help. You may be thinking too much about which vegetables to include in your diet, forgetting the importance of quitting smoking or getting more sleep. So give this tool a try if you want to know where to start.