Today, I’d like to talk to you about protecting your heart.
Speaking of the most important organs in the whole body, I believe most people will say, “That must be the heart.” Even in our daily life, we are used to using the heart as a metaphor for important things, which is enough to recognise the importance of the heart.
The heart is the engine of the human body. It keeps beating, pushing the circulation of blood in the blood vessels of our whole body, providing sufficient blood flow to organs and tissues to supply oxygen and various nutrients (such as water, inorganic salts, glucose, protein, various water-soluble vitamins, etc.). The mitochondria in the cell receive from the heart. After the viscera pumps out the oxygen and nutrients brought by the blood, it will start to work and generate energy that can make the cells active. At the same time, the blood flow pumped by the heart will also take away the end products of metabolism (such as carbon dioxide, urea and uric acid, etc.), so that cells can maintain normal metabolism and function. All kinds of endocrine hormones and some other humoral factors in the body should also be transported to the target cells through blood circulation to realise the body fluid regulation and maintain the relative constant environment in the body. If the heart no longer beats, the human body’s metabolism will not be carried out. When human life begins to be conceived in the maternal embryo, the heart begins to work day and night. In a quiet state, the heart needs to output 5-6L of blood per minute. When exercising, the oxygen and nutrients needed by the cells of the whole body increase, and the heart also needs to work overtime. The workload per minute can reach 25-30L. The work of pumping blood in a person’s heart for a lifetime is equivalent to lifting 30,000 kilograms of objects to the peak of the Himalayas. With such a workload, the heart is definitely the most important “labour model” in the body. It can’t even rest for a moment! If the heart does not beat for more than 4 minutes, people will die completely due to lack of oxygen in the brain [1]. People will be exhausted when they continue to work, not to mention our important heart. The occurrence of coronary heart disease, wind heart disease, cardiomyopathy and other cardiovascular diseases makes the already overburdened heart even worse, seriously threatening human health and life. According to epidemiological statistics, in 2018, cardiovascular disease mortality accounted for the first place in the total cause of death of urban and rural residents in China. At present, there are 330 million patients with cardiovascular disease in China, including 11 million stroke, 11.39 million for coronary heart disease, 5 million for pulmonary heart disease, 8.9 million for heart failure, and atrial fibrillation. 870,000, rheumatic heart disease 2.5 million, congenital heart disease 2 million, lower limb artery disease 45.3 million, hypertension 245 million [2].
For cardiovascular diseases, China’s policy is to “focus on the grassroots and focus on prevention”, advocate the health management of the whole life cycle of cardiovascular, and emphasise cardiovascular health in the early stage of life. Therefore, the prevention of heart disease is particularly important. In the past 15 years, the heart rate and mortality rate in developed countries have decreased significantly precisely because of the focus on the prevention of heart disease. On the contrary, in the past 15 years in China, the number of people suffering from coronary heart disease in the 35 to 44 age group has increased by 150%. Focussing on the prevention of heart disease is exactly what we lack.
How to prevent heart disease and protect the heart? This should start with all aspects of our daily diet and living.
1. Refuse to stay up late
Do you need to say more about the harm of staying up late? Although everyone knows that staying up late is not good, the mobile phone still can’t be put down. Staying up late at night is actually to torture your body, especially your heart. Staying up late will raise blood pressure and cholesterol, which will bring health risks to the heart.
2. Keep exercising
In fact, the cells of the heart, like other organs of the human body, tend to “use and waste”, and regular exercise will keep them function better. It is recommended that you do 15 minutes of exercise between work, which can not only relieve fatigue but also protect the heart, but pay attention to the scope of your own exercise ability. If you exceed the burden of the heart, it will not be worth the loss.
3. Diet control
Eating high-fat and high-cholesterol foods will increase the burden on the heart. There is nothing to say about a healthy diet. In fact, everyone knows it very well. It depends on whether self-discipline can be strictly controlled [3].
Another question is also very critical. The heart keeps beating from birth to death, and the rhythmic contraction of myocardial cells requires a lot of energy. So what really supplies myocardial cells with continuous energy? The answer is mitochondria. As an energy factory for cells, mitochondria produce most of the ATP needed to drive the normal operation of cells in the body, which plays an important role in myocardial cells.
However, with the ageing of the body, mitochondria are also constantly damaged, resulting in insufficient cell energy supply. More and more evidence proves that there is a causal relationship between the ageing of mitochondria and the development of heart disease. Due to too much mitochondrial overtime, the by-product oxygen free radicals (ROS) of mitochondrial work will also be too much. Don’t underestimate ROS. After it exceeds the endogenous clearance ability, it can change protein and lipid function, trigger cell death, and further cause heart damage. Over time, a series of heart problems came one after another.
