Good Healthy Advice

Help Us Pump Funds Into Heart Research

When you purchase The Tony Ferguson Cook Book during the month of May, we will donate $1 from the purchase price to a leading heart research charity.

Not only will you be investing in your own heart health today with our new cookbook, you’ll be investing in research to help many thousands of Australians tomorrow.

A Month of Exercise Helps Ease Heart Failure

April 8 (HealthDay News) -- Just four weeks of moderate exercise is enough to boost the cardiac performance and breathing capacity of patients with heart failure, a new study finds.

This slightly more strenuous exercise program -- in standard use in Europe for people with heart failure -- works at least as well as the less intense American regimen, the researchers noted. They presented the findings Tuesday at the Experimental Biology conference in San Diego.

In heart failure, the heart progressively loses the ability to pump blood. In the United States, doctors typically recommend three-times-a-week exercise sessions for eight to 12 weeks to help ease the condition, noted study author Stephen F. Crouse, a professor of kinesiology and internal medicine at Texas A&M University, in College Station.

His team looked at data from an Austrian rehabilitation center where 366 heart failure patients (average age 63) exercised 14 to 22 minutes on stationery bicycles six times a week. Participants also did a brisk 45-minute walk each day.

Positive steps to reduce your risk of heart disease

Source: Heart Foundation

Your heart needs care for life. A healthy heart is about enjoying a healthy lifestyle and making this a part of your everyday life. It is also about taking positive steps to reduce risk factors.

Everyone can do something to help prevent heart disease, including people who already have heart disease or who have had a heart event. The good news is that if you lead a healthy lifestyle, as outlined below, you can reduce your risk of developing heart disease.

The best ways to reduce the risk of developing heart disease, and to help prevent it getting worse if it already exists is to reduce or remove the risk factors over which we have some control.

To do this, have ongoing heart disease risk assessments with your doctor and lead a healthy lifestyle as outlined below. Being male, increasing age and having a family history of early death from heart disease are also risk factors for developing heart disease, but are much more difficult to control or change!

1. Be smokefree

Smoking reduces the amount of oxygen in your blood and damages the artery walls. Stopping smoking is the single most important thing you can do to reduce your risk of coronary heart disease. For more information on quitting smoking, call the Quitline on 131 848.