What steps are you taking to keep your heart healthy?

SALT LAKE CITY – February is American Heart Month. It’s a great time to remind yourself, “What steps am I taking to keep my heart healthy?”

In the latest Let’s Get Moving with Maria podcast episode, Maria Shilaos spoke with Curtis Anderson, Faculty Member of Arizona College of Nursing, to learn how to spot the signs of a potential heart attack and what steps we can take to better protect our heart.

While genetics may play a role in heart health, there are things that we can do to keep it in good shape.

“When it comes to taking care of your heart, diet and exercise are really the biggest things that we have control over,” Anderson said.

A common mistake that people make has to do with eating habits. There are several diet recommendations that pop up when people search for a topic like “how to lose weight quickly.”

“Things like that might lose you a little bit of weight relatively quickly, but that weight will almost always come back,” Anderson said.

It’s important to eat a rounded diet, meaning you are getting healthy fat into your system. Unfortunately, there’s not enough healthy fats in the American diet.

“The unhealthy fats are saturated fats,” Anderson said. “We still need some of them every day, but the American diet definitely has too many saturated fats.”

Anderson says it’s okay to have foods that are low fat or no fat every once in a while. However, we should always be looking into more unsaturated fats, such as olive oil, avocados, and nuts.

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