How exercise and eating healthy help prevent heart disease

Student’s Name Instructor’s Name Institution Course Date How Exercise and Eating Healthy Help Prevent Heart Disease Introduction Genetic and environment attributes are to blame for many diseases of the heart. These factors can cause a disturbance in gene transcript levels, metabolite levels, and protein levels, which in turn disturbs the molecule’s interactions within themselves. Disturbance of the molecular links in the end leads to cellular and physiological states disturbance, which contributes to the diseases (Esselstyn 9). Understanding the molecular networks can lead to crucial understanding of the pathogenic mechanisms of diseases of the heart. When these facts are amplified to a bigger scale, this understanding can lead to many actions that can be taken against heart disease among them exercising and eating healthy. Overview of Heart Diseases According to the Heart Foundation, heart diseases include stroke, heart attack, and other cardiovascular diseases. Hutchins et al. (722), state that heart disease is having one or several heart conditions such as the coronary artery disease, heart failure, angina, and arrhythmia among others. Heart disease is the number killer in the U.S, killing almost 787,000 people in the year 2011 alone (The Heart Foundation). However, cardio vascular disease alone takes more lives than the combined total of all forms of cancer (The Heart Foundation); nearly, 380,000 die from it annually. The costs incurred due to heart diseases are in excess of more than $320.1 billion in the U.S. This takes into consideration health expenditures and loss in productivity. When it comes to heart disease, it is important to keep a healthy lifestyle. By educating participants, for example, the Wabash Valley Complete Health Program (CHIP), a community-based lifestyle change program hopes to avert and reverse heart disease effects as well as all its forms. Some of this lifestyle forms include making positive choices such as physical activity, dietary habits, and stress management. A research carried out by CHIP had 51 participants for 8 weeks split into 16 sessions (Hutchins et al. 722). These included pre and post health screenings for comparison. The health screenings were total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, glucose, triglycerides, weight (pounds), systolic blood pressure, body mass index, resting heart rate and diastolic blood pressure. The collective data for the participants of each type of heart disease were used to compare the pre and post heart screen data. The results proved that indeed a healthy lifestyle reduced the aforementioned factors to 19.2% from 4.8% (Hutchins et al. 722). Eating Healthy Choosing healthy foods has proven to have a relation with heart disease. Research has been able to prove that a Mediterranean Diet, one of the specific diet plans, results in a 50% to 70% reduction in heart disease risk (Hutchins et al. 723). To add to that, more than 47% cash meant for food is spent on fast food restaurant by a single American. These foods are quite commonly high in fat, salt and sugar, which are all contributors to heart diseases. A healthy diet is made up of essential nutrients, carbohydrates, calories, fats, and protein that are associated with less risk to heart disease (Hutchins e...