Partners for Your Health Blog

Heart Health Holiday Tips

The American Heart Association has a page of helpful tips for the holidays that includes heart-healthy recipes with a grocery list and tips for healthy twists on traditional favorites. You can even send your invitation using their website and offer friends an opportunity to donate to the AHA at the same time.

Here are some of their heart-warming, heart-friendly tips:

• Choose assorted unsalted nuts, fiber-rich crackers and raw vegetables with low-fat dressing or hummus for quick snacks or appetizers at a holiday party. These are great alternatives to a typical cheese platter that’s loaded with saturated fat.
• If you like eggnog, be sure you buy the low-fat or fat-free version to cut down on calories and fat. Mulled apple cider is an even better choice.
• Select fat-free evaporated milk to make mashed potatoes creamy.
• Use low-sodium chicken broth to get a little more flavor in your potatoes.
• Stuffing mixes are holiday classics. Make your own colorful and heart-healthy version by mixing in dried cranberries, raisins and apricots instead of meat.
• Skip the prepackaged gravy mixes and make your own! Low-sodium broth and skim milk make delicious and more heart-healthy gravy.
• Avoid pre-packaged pumpkin pies – the crusts are typically filled with transfats and saturated fats. Crustless pumpkin pies or angel food cakes with fresh or frozen berries are tasty alternatives. Skip pre-packaged cakes and cookies, too.

This holiday season, you might want to give the gift of information by sign up for one of their heart-health e-newsletters for yourself or for a friend. Every edition is packed with reliable, science-based news, tips and tools about managing your condition and improving your heart (and overall) health. And you’ll get a new recipe every month! Their e-newsletters cover caregivers, heart attack, arrhythmia, cholesterol, heart failure, high blood pressure and peripheral artery disease. Visit americanheart.org/myheartnews to sign up and send a gift to a friend.

October is Sudden Cardiac Awareness Month, Cardiac Arrest facts

According to the American Heart Association October is Sudden Cardiac Awareness Month.  So here is some of the basic information that they offer about CPR, which is short for “cardiopulmonary resuscitation”. 

• Sudden cardiac arrest is most often caused by ventricular fibrillation (VF)--an abnormal heart rhythm.
• Cardiac arrest can also occur after the onset of a heart attack or as a result of electrocution or near-drowning.
• Recognizing the signs: When sudden cardiac arrest occurs, the victim collapses, becomes unresponsive to gentle shaking, stops normal breathing and after two rescue breaths, still isn’t breathing normally, coughing or moving.
• Death from sudden cardiac arrest is not inevitable. If more people knew CPR, more lives could be saved.
• About 80 percent of all cardiac arrests (outside of a hospital) occur at home, so being trained to perform CPR can mean saving the life of a loved one.
•  Effective CPR, provided immediately after cardiac arrest, can double a victim’s chance of survival.
• CPR helps maintain vital blood flow to the heart and brain and increases the amount of time that an electric shock from a defibrillator can be effective.
• Brain death starts to occur four to six minutes after someone experiences cardiac arrest if no CPR and defibrillation occurs during that time.
• If bystander CPR is not provided, a sudden cardiac arrest victim’s chances of survival fall 7 percent to 10 percent for every minute of delay until defibrillation.
• There are 294,851 emergency medical services-treated out-of-hospital cardiac arrests annually in the United States.

Learning CPR can give your loved one time to receive needed immediate care in a hospital Emergency Department and be seen by a NOHC Cardiologist.  NOHC provides state-of-the-art cardiology services. However, we believe that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. Come to our heart center so we can help you prevent the need for emergency services.