By Staff
This is the mother of all wakeup calls. It's the number one killer of women - one out of two will die from it. It could be you.
What is the number one killer of women in America? Breast cancer? Car accidents? If you haven't guessed yet, the answer is cardiovascular disease. In the past 12 months, more women - 494,000, to be exact - were killed by cardiovascular disease than by any other cause.
If you didn't see this episode of the Oprah show, you missed out on some very scary, but very true facts. It was a BIG message to all women that heart disease should not be taken lightly and that most women don't even know they are being triggered by this deadly disease.
During this show, Dr. Mehmet Oz took a look inside of the human heart and compared very healthy hearts, to those which were not. If you didn't see the show, please take this column into consideration.
Cardiovascular disease is a wide-ranging problem. "It's the rusting of our arteries," Dr. Oz explained to the audience. "Literally, the tubes that carry nourishment to our different organs are rotting from the inside. And that's not just about dying from heart attacks and strokes. It's about kidney failure and loss of quality of life. You see, it's not just the heart that rots, you rust the arteries to the brain and the kidneys as well. So this statistic means one out of two women, odds are, will die of kidney failure, stroke or heart attack.”
The Facts About Heart Disease for Women
Heart disease is the number one killer of women
Heart disease refers to the blockages of the arteries, according to Dr. Mehmet Oz.
 Dr. Judith Reichman says that it is estimated that one out of every two women will die from heart disease.
Heart disease kills ten times more women than breast cancer each year, and more than all other cancers combined
 One in ten women aged 45 to 64 already suffers from some form of heart disease, and some don't even know it.
According to one study, nearly one fourth of women who died of heart disease were between the ages of 35 and 44.
Women vs. Men
 Many of the symptoms of heart disease are often ignored, unrecognized or misdiagnosed, because women's symptoms are completely different than men's.
 Women under the age of 75 are twice as likely to die than men, because both female and male doctors often misdiagnose the symptoms, according to Dr. Judith Reichma
 According to Dr. Reichman, women have heart attacks five to ten years later than men, because women's estrogen levels decrease over time and as women become menopausal, they lose some of their protection against heart disease.
Dr. Mehmet Oz says that women's hearts are physically different than men's. He says that if you look at the arteries that provide blood flow to the heart muscle, men's are like rigid pipes, while women's are soft. Only 30 percent of women who have heart attacks have calcium in their arteries, whereas 90 percent of men who have heart attacks have calcium in their arteries. Therefore, heart disease is a different disease for women than it is for men.
Here's another scary thought
If your waist size is more than 35 inches and you're a woman-or 40 inches for men-you have a major risk factor for heart attacks because the omentum (an organ that can make you fat). A normal omentum should be one inch thick. Have a “beer belly?” It's actually an oversized omentum.
So what can you do about this?
There's always hope for turning things around. Exercise to build heart health. What does that mean? That means we have to break a sweat 60 minutes a week. That's not a lot to ask, in fact that's only about seven minutes a day. That's it, that's all you need.
Also make sure you eat healthy all the time. When this earth was created, it was made with fruits and vegetables, not french fries and cupcakes. Eating right and getting proper exercise can extremely lower your chances of developing heart disease.
Do not take this as a joke or think it won't happen to you, because it can and it will if we continue to live and eat the way we do.
Seven minutes - that's all! And a healthy serving of fruits and veggies may help save your life. Aren't you worth it?