Today is National Wear Red Day!

What's up R.C.,

For those of you who don't know, today, February 4th, is the American Heart Association's Go Red for Women official Wear Red day! This means that all over the country women (and men) are wearing red in support of this campaign, the mission of which is to fight heart disease in women. If you click on their website, you'll be able to browse the various pieces of the project, including survivor stories from women who have lived through cardiac episodes, and you'll be able to "Tell 5" other women how important it is that they give their heart health a little TLC. Check it out, and keep checking back here to see pictures of Richland County going red!

In other news...
You didn't think I was going to forget about our biology lesson today, did you? Just bear with me and I promise I'll stop throwing big scary science words at you soon!

Sooooo
Something I wanted to make sure we talked about before getting into how you can prevent cardiovascular disease is how these disease typically develop. You've all probably heard all of the hype about eating healthy and exercising, but really, who listens to that and who's got the time these day? Well, the answer to the second part will come a little later, but those recommendations are pretty serious.

Your daily biology

Your heart is an organ in your chest that is kept alive by constant blood supply that gives your heart cells oxygen. The blood flows to the heart via arteries, or really big blood vessels that deliver oxygenated blood to an organ. What happens in many cardiovascular diseases is that the substance I mentioned before, plaque, builds up in an artery that supplies blood and oxygen to the heart, blocking blood flow.

Plaque is made of mostly fats and cholesterol, substances that you obtain from the foods you eat. These fats and cholesterol get stuck to the walls of an artery over time, gradually narrowing the width of the artery and decreasing it's ability to properly pump blood to the heart. This is called atherosclerosis.

This picture was borrowed from Heart Healthy Women. It shows how plaque builds up in your artery, narrowing the width. This causes less blood flow to that part of the heart, so the heart muscle dies.

So why does atherosclerosis happen? The walls of the artery become damaged, which may be caused by smoking, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, or other risk factors. This makes it easier for fats and cholesterol to stick to that spot. When your immune system tries to fix the damage to the artery wall, the wall becomes more sticky, making it even easier for plaque to stick there, so your plaque spot gets bigger. Eventually, pieces of hard plaque can break off. Your immune system tries to heal this by creating a blot clot (just like a scab on a cut), which may block off that artery all together, causing a heart attack. If a piece of the clot breaks off and blocks an artery in the brain, you have a stroke.

The moral of the story...
The only control you have over these diseases is to control your risk factors. This means that you should think about:
Smoking: You are 2 to 4 times more likely to develop coronary heart disease if you smoke than if you don't, and you are more likely to die from it, according to the American Heart Association. Why? Besides the harmful chemicals found in cigarettes, smoking damages your lungs, decreasing your body's ability to send oxygen to your body.
High cholesterol: Cholesterol is a type of fat found in many "bad for you" foods, but high cholesterol can also be hereditary- aka thank your mom and dad for that one! You do have some control, because really, you are the one controlling the types of foods you eat. A high cholesterol diet puts more cholesterol in your blood stream, making it more likely that it will eventually stick to the walls of an artery. Bad news.
High blood pressure: Your blood pressure is a measure of how hard your heart has to pump in order to pump blood in and out of the organ. High blood pressure increases the heart's workload, causing the heart muscle to become stiffer- kind of the same way your abs become stiffer after about one million situps.
Physical inactivity: When you work out, you burn off carbs, calories, and fats that would otherwise sit in your body, enter your blood stream and stick to your artery walls. 
Obesity: Being overweight not only makes your heart work harder to pump blood to all of the parts of your body, but it also raises your blood pressure and cholesterol levels, and make you more likely to develop diabetes. You can decrease your risk of developing cardiovascular disease by losing just 10 pounds.
Diabetes: Having uncontrolled or poorly controlled blood sugar increases your risk of developing and dying from a cardiovascular disease.

Want more info? Check out these sites: The American Heart Association, and Heart Healthy Women

Next time: An update on the IronHeart Duathlon, and your first tips and tricks to reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease. Stay tuned!

Until next time,
From my heart to yours,
Red in Richland County

P.S. Don't forget to check out the Flickr site- I've got a few of my pics up there, a few from the Sidney v. Glendive basketball game, and the OFFICIAL From the Heart t-shirt, available at Jock Stop for $18.