Your Heart Is In Your Hands

The Centers for Disease Control has launched an ambitious campaign aimed at preventing a million cardiovascular events by 2022, appropriately titled Million Hearts.  Their website has some very basic information about the prevention of heart disease, summarized under the call to “Practice Healthy Living Habits” and including a ton of free tasty-looking recipes, FYI!

Time Health author Jamie Ducharme just wrote a well-researched article on this initiative, including plenty of links to the primary literature behind the CDC’s plea to please please pretty please practice healthy living habits, please!

The interesting thing about this Time Health article, is that in addition to the big major daily habits like eating a healthy plant-based diet, exercising regularly, maintaining a healthy weight, not smoking, and very light alcohol intake,  the author adds social connection, stress management, and regular sauna use.

Now, I’ve written a great deal about lifestyle habits for heart and general health at Harvard Health Blog, and I even have a whole book coming out in December 2018 on this. I am in agreement with almost all of these lifestyle habits for heart health, except I had never yet heard about sauna use and heart health. Apparently, there is quite a bit of research to back this up (pretty much all of it from Finland)!

Check out the Time Health article, and let me know what you think. Will you be adding regular sauna bathing to your life? I may think about it myself!