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February is National Heart Disease
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Know the risks for heart disease!
The leading cause of death for both men and women in the United States is cardiovascular disease, which includes heart disease and stroke. They kill an estimated 630,000 Americans each year.
Heart disease can be prevented. American Heart Month is a good time to decide what you can do to achieve a heart-healthy life.
The most common type of heart problem is coronary artery disease (CAD), which can lead to a heart attack. You can reduce your risk through lifestyle changes and, in some cases, medication, such as a statin.
The American Heart Association's Go Red For Women campaign urges citizens to spread the message that heart disease is not only a man's problem. More women die of cardiovascular disease than from the next four causes of death combined, including all forms of cancer. Women once believed breast cancer was their greatest health risk; new data show that while one in 30 women die of breast cancer, one in three women die of heart disease.
Eighty percent of all cardiac events can be prevented if people made the right choices for their hearts. The advice for both men and women is the same:
- Watch your weight
- Quit smoking
- Control cholesterol
- Control blood pressure
- Drink alcohol in moderation
- Get active and eat healthy
- Manage stress
Don't wait more than five minutes before calling 911 for help if you experience any of these signs.
This month, we can rededicate ourselves to reducing the burden of heart disease by taking steps to improve our own heart health and encouraging our families to do the same.
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Happy Valentine's Day!
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Valentines Day has mysterious, romantic origins.
On February 14, lovers, friends and family members exchange Valentine cards or gifts as tokens of caring and love. Valentine's Day is one of the most romantic days of the year.
Its history, however, is shrouded in mystery. One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made the best soldiers, he outlawed marriage for young men. Valentine defied Claudius and performed marriages for young lovers in secret. When it was discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.
According to another legend, Valentine sent the first valentine greeting himself. While in prison, he fell in love with a young girl who often visited him. Before his death, he wrote her a letter, which he signed "From your Valentine."
Others claim that the Christian church celebrated Valentine's feast day in February to compete with celebrations of the pagan Lupercalia festival, which began on February 15. It was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture.
In Great Britain, Valentine was one of the most popular saints. Valentine's Day began to be celebrated in the seventeenth century. By the 18th century, it was common for friends and lovers to exchange tokens of affection or handwritten notes. Some years later, printed cards began to replace written letters. They were an easy way to express emotions in a time when direct expression of one's feelings was discouraged.
In the 1840s, Esther A. Howland began to sell the first mass-produced valentines in America. According to the Greeting Card Association, an estimated 1 billion valentine cards are sent each year, making Valentine's Day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year. About 2.6 billion cards are sent for Christmas.
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Random Acts of Kindness Week:
February 13-19
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Watch this RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS
video shot in Red Bank, NJ
This celebration is held to increase awareness of kindness and its benefits to both the giver and receiver.
Anonymous acts make the giver feel good, maybe for the rest of the day or evening. The odd thing about it is that you can't plan to do any particular type of kindness, all you can do is recognize an opportunity to kindly help someone.
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Healthy Home Improvement Resolutions for 2012
Make Your Home Eco-Friendly: It's not just about jumping on the environmental green-craze wagon. Making your home more eco-friendly not only helps the environment but also can save you money. There are a number of ways to retro-fit your home to be green. A small and easy change is switching all your standard light bulbs out for CFL or LED bulbs. These bulbs are environmentally friendly and also can save around $50 per bulb in electric coststhroughout their
lifetime. Another small change that can make big difference is installing a few low cost solar panels for outdoor lighting.
For those with homes in cold weather climates, a big eco-friendly change might be adding better insulation to your home, saving you a ton in heating bills. For those in warmer climates that are constantly watering their lawn, an artificial lawn can look just as good but save water and maintenance bills.
Designate an Exercise Room: We all have a room in our house for relaxation - a couch potato heaven that has the big screen TV, plush arm chair, and table to kick your feet up on. That's all swell, but what about when you need to get some physical activity? It's often difficult to build up the motivation to keep up with a gym membership - we're always making excuses like 'the gym is too far,' and 'I'm too tired before or after work.'
It's time to throw out those excuses and designate one room in your house as an 'exercise room.' It could be making a simple modification to that room by adding just one machine like a treadmill or stairclimber. Simply calling a room in your home 'an exercise room' can often be enough motivation to get you off the couch and into a physical workout routine.
Get Rid of Your Junk, Finally: We also all have rooms in our homes that are filled with useless clutter
and junk. For many of us this room is the basement or garage, which serves as the graveyard for old boxes of toys, broken down appliances and torn up pieces of furniture. Not only does this junk take up unnecessary room that could be put to better use, but it also takes up room in your head - leading to elevated stress.
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