Dr. Matthew Barrett

And it's very easy to move the dial from potentially being at risk down the line.

to potentially then avoiding a major problem.

And we're all living longer.

We all want to have a healthier, older life.

And the human body wasn't really designed to live much faster than 50.

If you want to keep healthy into your older age, you need to be making these adjustments earlier on in your life and being aware of them rather than allowing to be running in the background and putting you at risk in the future.

The most straightforward one is cigarette smoking as an absolute no-no in terms of something you should be getting on top of.

Anybody who smokes, or even if it's only a few cigarettes a day, absolutely, that's one of the biggest risk factors you can modify to reduce your risk of having a heart attack in the future.

And that can so much as double your chance of having a heart attack.

Other than that, moderate intensity activity.

We described the level of activity that it would take to make you feel

difficult to hold a conversation or sing that kind of feeling out of breath when you're doing something so not just very very gentle exercise like going for a very gentle walk we're talking moderate intensity where you're building up a little bit of a sweat and we're talking about doing about 150 minutes of that a week so about half an hour a day five days a week at least just to try and make sure that your heart is feeling the exercise your heart rate's going up a little bit and that it's

having a biological effect in your body where you can feel that exercise.

Those are kind of the lifestyle things, obviously maintaining a healthy, varied diet, maintaining a normal body weight and a normal body fat percentage as best you can.

And those are the things that anybody should be doing and trying to ensure that their heart health, separate from things like the medical side of things, like things like blood pressure, cholesterol, et cetera, those are always going to be good for you.

So everyone should be striving to do that in the first instance.

But then we should also be aware that sometimes that isn't enough.

So, you know, you're not going to feel if you have high blood pressure or if you have high cholesterol, that could be grumbling in the background.

You can feel perfectly healthy.

And then all of a sudden crash land into hospital or something out of the blue, like an acute heart attack that's actually been building up for a while, completely unbeknownst to you.