Having a healthy heart is essential for a long and active life, of course, but achieving optimal heart health can be tricky – it requires aerobic exercise, good lifestyle choices, and balanced nutrition. Sometimes life gets in the way, though, and it becomes difficult to maintain a heart-healthy lifestyle. Busy work and family schedules can make it hard to find time to shop for fresh foods every day, for example, and squeezing in enough time to cook a nutritious meal from fresh ingredients can seem overwhelming.
Fortunately, heart-healthy multivitamins can make it easier to give your heart all of the nutrients it needs to function well for a lifetime. Not all multivitamins are created equal, though, and only some contain the nutrients your heart needs to function well. In this article you will learn:
- About the heart
- How to improve heart health
- How Bioactive Multi is a heart-healthy vitamin
About the Heart
Before you can learn how to improve heart health, it helps to know a little about your heart and cardiovascular system.
Your heart is a hard-working muscular organ that is about as big as your fist – it beats about 115,000 times every day, which works out to about 2.5 billion times over the course of the average lifetime. [1, 2] Every beat of your heart pushes oxygen- and nutrient-rich blood to cells and tissues around your body. In fact, your heart pumps about 2,000 gallons of life-giving blood throughout your body each day.
Certain medical conditions can affect the health of your heart and its ability to pump blood. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) can prevent the heart and blood vessels from delivering blood properly, for example, and this can rob the organs – including the heart – of the oxygen and nutrients they need.
Nearly half of all adults in the United States have some form of cardiovascular disease, according to the American Heart Association, making CVD a significant source of ill health and death among Americans. [3] In fact, CVD claims about 2,380 lives each day, which works out to about one death every 36 seconds. [4] The number of deaths from cardiovascular disease has been rising steadily since the early 1900s, and after reaching a peak of nearly 800,000 deaths per year in the early 1980s then dropping slightly in the 2010s, the incidence of CVD is on the rise again.
Cardiovascular disease isn't the only type of heart problem, though. High blood pressure, heart rhythm problems, heart valve disease, and congestive heart failure can all cause poor health. Deposits of fat and calcium can combine to cause plaque, which accumulate in the arteries to cause atherosclerosis and obstruct blood flow. Atherosclerosis increases the risk of coronary artery disease, heart attacks, and strokes. [5]
How to Improve Heart Health
Exercise
The American Heart Association says adults should get at least 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity or 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity aerobic activity per week to improve their heart health [6]. For best results spread the workout throughout the week rather than trying to be a "weekend warrior."
Just as exercise strengthens the other muscles in your body, physical activity strengthens the muscles of your heart. Exercise also helps your heart muscle pump more efficiently, which means your heart pumps more blood with every heartbeat. Operating at maximum efficiency keeps your heart rate and blood pressure under control.
Eat Right
Proper nutrition is the key to a healthy heart, as your heart needs high-quality fuel in the right amounts to run at peak performance year in and year out. Consume only as many calories as you can burn in the course of a day. Eating a low-calorie diet can help you achieve and maintain a healthy weight. Eat a variety of nutrient-packed foods from each of the food groups, including fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, nuts and legumes, non-tropical vegetable oils, skinless poultry and fish, and low-fat dairy products. Avoid diets high in saturated fat, which can cause cholesterol to accumulate up in your blood vessels, leading to CVD.
Quit Smoking
Smoking is a major cause of cardiovascular disease – in fact, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) names smoking as "the chief cause of preventable disease and death in the United States." Cigarette smoke contains more than 7,000 chemicals that contaminate the blood to damage the heart muscle and blood vessels. Smoking increases your heart rate, tightens major arteries, causes irregular heart rhythms, and increases your blood pressure.
Alleviate Stress
Chronic stress can lead to high blood pressure, also known as hypertension. Stress can also contribute to poor health behaviors, such as smoking, overeating or an unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, lack of sleep and not taking medications as prescribed – each of these unhealthy behaviors can be hard on your heart. [7]
Reduce your stress by exercising regularly, making time for family and friends, getting enough sleep, practice relaxation, enjoying a favorite hobby, and maintaining a positive attitude. Practicing any type of meditation promotes the "rest and digest" functions in humans, which helps combat the "fight or flight" response to stress [8].
Lose Weight
Carrying around excess weight causes your heart to work harder to pump through the growing number of arteries to serve the larger size body [9]. The increased workload causes the chamber, or cavity of the heart, to enlarge; the muscles of the heart get thicker too in an effort to compensate for the extra work. Over time, a person's heart may not be able to compensate, and it may lose its ability to relax between heartbeats or even lose its ability to pump blood to the far reaches of the body. These effects may lead to heart failure.
To lose weight, exercise regularly and stay away from calorie-rich, nutrient-poor snack foods.
Use A Daily Multivitamin
Eating a balanced diet isn't always easy – your busy lifestyle can prevent you from buying fresh food and cooking heart-healthy meals, and this can leave gaps in your nutrition. Taking a heart-healthy vitamin supplement helps fill these nutritional gaps so that you always get the vitamins and minerals your cardiovascular system needs to stay healthy.
For optimal heart health benefits, though, you need to choose the right daily multivitamin. Instead of selecting a multivitamin that contains a broad spectrum of nutrients, which typically supports general health, opt for a multivitamin that contains nutrients that target heart health. These multivitamins should include effective doses of vitamin K2, for example, along with niacin, folate, and polyphenols.
Choose a multivitamin that can provide 100% of the effective dose of its heart-healthy ingredients. Look for a multivitamin in liquid form: some nutrients cannot be included at 100% of its effective dose in a multivitamin pill, as the sheer amount of the ingredient would make the multivitamin too large to swallow. Liquid multivitamins overcome this restriction to supply your heart with all of the nutrients it needs to function well.
Your multivitamin should also deliver bioactive nutrients and essential micronutrients into your body efficiently, naturally, and conveniently. Unlike less-absorbable tablets that can get stuck in your throat, liquid multi-vitamins or the newer gel vitamins are easy to swallow and digest, and they offer superior nutrient absorption.
Discover Our Heart-Healthy Adult Gel Vitamin
Healthycell Bioactive Multi is a daily liquid gel (MICROGEL™) vitamin that delivers the heart-healthy nutrients, allowing maximum absorption into blood cells in ways pills cannot. In fact, you would need to swallow five or more pills to get the same nutritional value from just one gel pack of Healthycell Bioactive Multi.
Healthycell Bioactive Multi contains MICROGEL™, a next-generation ultra-bioavailability nutrient delivery technology that replaces inefficient tablets, capsules, and powders. MICROGEL™ is a more natural way of supplementing your heart health routine too, as the advanced technology eliminates the need for synthetic fillers, binding glues, anti-caking agents, and coatings, often listed simply as "other ingredients" by many other supplements. Simply swallow this great-tasting, natural mixed berry flavored gel directly from a convenient single-dose gel pack, mix it with water or add it to a smoothie.
Healthycell Bioactive Multi is a rich source of the core ingredients that support cardiovascular health. These ingredients include K2, niacin, folate and polyphenols, which are nutrients known to provide special benefits to the heart and blood vessels.
What Vitamins Are Good For Heart Health?
Heart-healthy multivitamins contain specific vitamins and minerals to promote cardiovascular health. When blended perfectly in a balanced, easy-to-metabolize form, each vitamin and mineral provides specific cardiovascular benefits.
Vitamin K2
In addition to helping the body make proteins that play a role in blood clotting, vitamin K2 helps redirect some of the calcium out of your bloodstream and into your bones. This action helps prevent the buildup of calcium in your blood to keep atherosclerosis in check.
Niacin
Niacin decreases the levels of the "bad" LDL cholesterol that contributes to heart disease; it also increases the levels of "good" HDL cholesterol that help reduce LDL cholesterol to prevent cardiovascular disease.
Folate
Folate helps lower levels of hom*ocysteine, an amino acid [10]. At high levels, hom*ocysteine can damage the lining of the arteries and cause cardiovascular disease. This amino acid can also make the blood clot more easily, which can increase the risk that a blood clot could block a blood vessel. You can get folate by eating animal foods and fermented foods, but you may benefit from folate supplements if you are trying to cut back on animal foods and do not eat enough fermented foods.
Polyphenols
Polyphenols are a group of naturally-occurring micronutrients found in plants that provide special health benefits. Specifically, polyphenols can help protect against heart disease in four ways:
- Improving the function of the inner lining of the heart and blood vessels
- Decreasing LDL cholesterol and increasing HDL cholesterol
- Decreasing platelets that cause blood clotting
- Fighting inflammation
Polyphenols are also antioxidants, which are substances that can slow or even stop tissue damage that can harm your heart. Antioxidants fight free radicals, which are unstable molecules that the body produces throughout the course of its natural metabolism. Antioxidant-rich polyphenols also inhibit oxidation, a process that produces free radicals and other chain reactions that can damage heart tissue.
Start Improving Your Cardiovascular Health
Knowing how to improve cardiovascular health is not a "one and done" proposition – it is a work in progress that requires a fair amount of knowledge about nutrients and making daily improvements to your lifestyle. Taking multivitamins that target heart health is one of the easiest, most effective, and most convenient ways of improving your cardiovascular health and wellness.
Healthycell Bioactive Multi can help you improve your cardiovascular health by providing your heart with the nutrients it needs for peak performance and optimal output. You can also shop our best-selling adult vitamins in gel form for more Healthycell products.
