If one was to list the most vital organs of the body, the
heart is in the top two. Your brain
projects your mind and embodies your spirit; without it you couldn't list
anything. If your heart is not number
one, your body's engine, which literally pumps life throughout the body, is
1a. A healthy heart is essential for
living a healthy life.
As February is National Heart Month, it is appropriate to
take a moment and reflect on how lifestyle affects heart health. Awareness of heart health is especially
important for younger people, like myself, who are settling into day-to-day
routines and habits that may determine the heart's fate.
It is natural that the young doesn't contemplate their
life's end, feeling that life is ever upward and forward; it's an irony in life
that if they were given prospective, they might adopt practices that could very
well extend their healthy years. But
this requires awareness.
Every family has a unique set of history and genes, and
being mindful of acute maladies common within a family can be predictive of what
you're more likely to suffer from. This
knowledge allows you to plot a path that will stymie what is preventable, and
detect and arrest early the unavoidable.
I happen to have heart disease in recent family history, on
both my mother's and father's sides. My
mother's mother--my Nana--has Prinzmetal's angina, a type of coronary artery
disease that is an early stage of congestive heart failure. Just hearing the term "failure"
made me fear that it was a death sentence and that Nana was terminally ill; but
she has set a wonderful example of brave dignity in controlling her condition, showing
that one is able to live a nearly normal life with heart disease.
My father's father died at the too young age of 56, from a massive
heart attack. His wife--my Mamaw--defiantly
independent despite being blind and increasingly deaf, has lived alone for over
30 years since his death. Alas, if
circumstances were different, imagine all the life he might have led in the
three decades lost!
Papaw, as I'm told was his familial nickname, died four
years before my birth. I've also been
told that Charles Dickens was called "Boz" by his family, and I sometimes
reflect that these two nicknames have about the same weight in my life--the names
just being two bits of remembered factoids--and I regret never having known the
man.
It is not because
of my Nana and my Grandfather, but for
them that I make a lifelong commitment to healthy heart practices. They're victims of their times. They lived at a time where pigs were breed to
yield lard as well as pork, and it was cooked into most meals. America was (and is still) a car culture, and
living in a rural hamlet (both lived in Sabina, Ohio) meant that they drove everywhere.
It was a time of ignorance, when doctors endorsed
cigarettes. My Grandfather was a smoker,
Nana lived with a smokers all her life. The
whole generation following the Great War was said to be "lost," to
the fruitless self-medication of alcohol abuse.
Indeed, society tolerated drinking amongst teenagers, and even treated
drunk driving as an unserious infraction against the community's laws and
safety.
Unfortunately though it was garnered at the expense of my
grandparents' health, it is I who benefits from the wisdom Modernity has gained. Nutrition was taught and re-taught to me
throughout primary and secondary schools.
With that knowledge and readily available resources on the internet, I
have more information on healthful foods than a nutritional expert a generation
ago. Today's commercial product distribution
makes it possible to have healthy foods from faraway lands--like bananas from
Belize--in isolated, snow-laden communities--like Sabina in February--for a
reasonably low price.
This is a time in which there are many gyms in most
neighborhoods (But only one Five Seasons in Cincinnati!). Through public awareness campaigns and
punitive taxation, smokers comprise a fraction of their numbers in generations past. Authorities muttering phrases like
"Parents who host lose the most," have cracked down on underage
drinking. Groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving have
lobbied to make driving under the influence a serious criminal offence, and the
releasing of mug shots and dashboard videos of offenders has helped to dissuade
like behavior.
I find that the whole rigmarole of social drinking--finding,
by hook or by crook, a designated driver; shelling out for lodging or livery
vehicle; or, God-forbid, crashing on some of the world's most uncomfortable
surfaces--makes me drink less. And
that's good for my heart.
And that's good for my health. The myriad of changes and reforms in just two
generations have empowered individuals to know what they need to do in order to
prevent heart disease and the means by which to do it.
it goes. . .
