This Valentine’s Day your Valentine may have the key to your heart but a proper diet and regular physical activity can be the key to a healthy heart!

Your heart pumps blood around your body carrying oxygen and nutrients to every cell. It usually beats 60-100 times per minute but can go faster when necessary. It beats about 100,000 times a day, more than 30 million times a year and about 2.5 billion times in a 70 year lifetime! So this organ needs a definite looking after!

Cardiovascular disease includes all the diseases of the heart and circulation including coronary heart disease (angina and heart attack), heart failure, congenital heart disease and stroke.

Important tips for a healthy heart include:

• Check family history of cardiovascular disease
• Eat healthy – cut down on salt, saturated fat and sugar, reduce alcohol consumption, eat more fish, eat your 5-a-day.
• Stop smoking
• Learn to manage stress
• Get moving with regular physical exercise
• Manage your weight
• Get BP and cholesterol regularly checked

Be heart healthy and call into one of our branches for a free blood pressure check today. We also offer health screening in our branches. Phone your pharmacist for more details.

By Helen Connolly MPSNI (Belfast Pharmacist)