The 40-Year-Old Heart Attack Victim

By Darryl A. Hill, MD

Laurel Medical Associates, LLC

. http://laurelmedicine.com

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The 40-Year-Old Heart Attack Victim

Years ago it was believed that as long as you ate well, exercised and did the right thing you could expect to live a long life. This is not the case anymore. As you witness people in their fourth and fifth decade of life pass away from disease and death that usually occur in the later stages of life you must wonder what is going on. The heart attack, heart failure, pancreatic cancer, strokes and sudden death of those in their 40s continues to occur at an alarming rate.

These horrible situations seem to cross all demographics. Some groups may have a slightly worse outcome than others, however everyone is suffering. Two recent situations seem to have left a permanent concern in my memory. This is because they were young and appeared to be healthy like many of us. But within what seemed like seconds they were gone and their young family and children left without a parent, a spouse, a friend.

It is interesting that we know most of the risk factors for disease, death and bad outcomes. Despite this, many of the reversible causes are related to lifestyle choices and we continue to engage in these activities as well. Improving lifestyles and making more healthy choices has always been important.

In many situations we are uneducated or miseducated when it comes to how to maintain our health. We are forced to actively get smarter on our own or suffer the consequences. We must increase our “Health IQ” to combat the incredible food marketing that we are bombarded with daily.

The amount of heart disease, obesity, metabolic syndrome, cancer and other disease we are seeing is a significant problem. Where is this increase in cancer and premature death coming from? It is in our grocery store, the fast food, the refrigerator, kitchen cabinet and other places that are a part of our usual daily activity. Not to mention, the television set, radio, newspapers and nutritional labels on many of the products that sit in stores across the country waiting for us to purchase them. Many of us don’t even think about this.

Until we become more educated about unsafe food products and change our lives we will continue to face deadly consequences of our lifestyle choices.