Heart Failure Archive

Dancing, playing sports, and even cleaning your house can give you a nontraditional workout that helps maintain good health.

 Image: Jon Feingersh/Thinkstock

Exercising is supposed to be a regular part of your daily health maintenance. That can be a problem if you don't have the motivation to get your heart pumping; you raise your risk for weight gain, chronic disease, and an earlier death.

Fortunately, you can get plenty of effective exercise by engaging in recreational or household activities that work your heart and muscles. "There's a real reward in doing an activity you enjoy, such as swimming or playing with your grandchildren. You get a workout, but it doesn't seem like you're exercising, and you may be more willing to keep doing that activity every day because it's fun," says Dawn Rogers, a physical therapist at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital.

On June 1, 2016, the FDA proposed voluntary guidelines for short- and long-term goals to cut sodium in commercially processed and prepared food. 

A recently published study claimed that people who ate a low sodium diet were more likely to suffer from cardiovascular disease and death. However, there were problems with this study – including difficulty with accurately measuring each study volunteer’s daily intake of sodium. Low sodium diets may be harmful for small subsets of people, but for the majority of people restricting salt intake is still important for cardiovascular health.

How many times your heart beats per minute when you’re resting — also known as your resting heart rate (RHR) — can provide important clues to your current overall health and even predict possible future health problems.

Getting immediate attention for symptoms of a transient ischemic attack can minimize the risk of a subsequent stroke.

We typically think of heart attacks as sudden, chest-clutching agony. But the reality is that nearly half of all heart attacks have no symptoms at all and go completely unnoticed by the people experiencing them — and, alarmingly, these “clinically silent” heart attacks are nearly identical to more overt heart attacks in terms of the damage they cause and the risk to a person’s future health.