With Valentine’s Day situated in the middle of February, it seems like this month we focus on stealing hearts, winning hearts, and even mending broken hearts. Ironically, February also happens to be American Heart Month, the perfect time to fuel this amazing organ emotionally and physically. Your heart is a vital part of living – each beat extends how long you survive. Caring for your heart is essential and with all of the amazing things it does, it is important to remember that heart disease is actually preventable and controllable through a number of methods – eating right, exercising, and staying hydrated just to name a few.
The heart is essential because of what it really does for our body. According to PBS, some of the most amazing heart facts are the beats and pumping throughout our lifetime. The heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood during an average lifetime—that’s enough to fill more than 3 super tankers. Your body has about 5.6 liters (6 quarts) of blood. This 5.6 liters of blood circulates through the body three times every minute. In one day, the blood travels a total of 12,000 miles—that’s four times the distance across the US from coast to coast. Likewise, your heart beats about 100,000 times in one day and about 35 million times in a year. During an average lifetime, the human heart will beat more than 2.5 billion times. It takes a lot of work for your heart to beat, too. For example, the amount of force it takes to squeeze a tennis ball with your bare hand is equal to the force it takes your heart to pump blood out to the body. Even when you are at rest, the muscles of your heart work very hard – actually twice as hard as the leg muscles of a person sprinting!
According to the CDC, heart disease is a major problem in this country. Every year, about 715,000 Americans have a heart attack. About 600,000 people die from heart disease in the United States each year—that’s 1 out of every 4 deaths. Heart disease, as previously mentioned, is preventable and controllable in many ways. Sadly, heart disease happens to be the leading cause of death for both men and women. Fluid intake may help support heart health, by affecting factors such as the thickness of blood and plasma. According to medical experts, drinking water is one of the ways you can maintain a healthier heart. A former study shows people who drank more than five glasses of water each day were less likely to die from a heart attack than those who drank fewer than two glasses a day. Researchers at Loma Linda University in California studied more than 20,000 healthy men and women aged 38 to 100 for six years. The study appears in the “May 1 American Journal of Epidemiology.” According to experts who completed this study, they found that “women who drank more than five glasses of water a day were 41% less likely to die from a heart attack during the study period than those who drank less than two glasses. The protective effect of water was even greater in men. Men who drank more water had a 54% lower risk of a fatal heart attack.” Our drinking water systems support health conscious Americans everywhere.
As we enter into American Heart Month, we can all get healthier by drinking more water but the key is safe, pure drinking water. When increasing your drinking water consumption, we suggest our drinking water systems and water filters which will supply your home and family with a continuous supply of safe drinking water from the tap and support your quest for a healthier heart. So fill a glass of safer drinking water from one of our drinking water systems and let’s cheers to a healthier heart which will beat strong for years to come!
