Slow down and avoid heartache (this Valentine's)

Everybody knows that fast living is bad for our hearts. This is not just the fast relationships. The culture of fast food, fast travel and fast technologies are also taking a toll on our health. But it is possible to slow down, and with it improve our prospects for a healthy old age.

There is much to be said for taking it slow. Whether we dream about slow cooking, slow sex or a 'Slow Boat to China'. Slow means valuing the experience and taking practical, logical and sustainable steps to look after it. It is not just about taking longer. Slow is about taking your time to make the most of our choices.

Slowing our lives can be summarised in seven principles which work whether applied to food, relationships or healthy ageing:

Slow solutions involve awareness and active engagement
Slow solutions have clear and realistic goals (slow is not an aimless meander)
Slow solutions eliminate the negative and accentuate the positive (love ageing, don't fear it)
Slow solutions are sustainable for the long-term (never a quick fix)
Slow solutions are not exclusive (there are no miracle 'cure-all' solutions)
Slow solutions need support (so get help)
Slow solutions are selective (there are no generic answers, so do the right thing (for you), in the right doses, and at the right pace, and stick to it)

Much of disease and ageing are the choices we make or fail to make with respect to our diet, physical activity, environment and lifestyle. Take heart disease as a good example. Heart attacks are a major cause of premature mortality of Australians, and significantly affect the quality of many Australians' retirements. If we value our old age, then finding ways for each of us to prevent or reverse this process should be high on our agenda. We don't have to be neurotic, but simply pay attention and make our choices as though they actually matter. The processes that lead to a heart attack take many years to come to a head. For the same reasons, the best prevention begins early with the choices we make in our diet and lifestyle. The combination of these measures can reduce our chances of falling in a pothole, and keep us on the road for many years to come.

Reducing systolic blood pressure will the lower the stress on our blood vessels, and keep our roads in better shape for longer.
Preventing impaired glucose tolerance or diabetes is more effective than any other way to reduce heart disease. Excessive levels of sugar act like the baking sun, causing our surfaces to become brittle and damage more easily when exposed to stress.
Increasing our physical activity has a range of positive effects, reducing stress on our arterial roads, improving glucose, fat and blood pressure control, optimising flow and preventing clogging.
LDL cholesterol is the bad cholesterol that deposits its cargo under the surface of the blood vessels. If we reduce our LDL-cholesterol, our risk of death from a heart attack or stroke risk is reduced.
Reducing exposure to oxidative stress will lower the stress on the road. Stopping or never smoking can achieve this. Diabetes, obesity, and a poor diet can also increase oxidative stress and can be prevented by the choices we make today.
Find any problems and fix them. Rather than sitting in silence, by recognising and treating problems early, the threshold of disaster can recede, and quality can be retained. Road works are sometimes necessary if the damage to the arteries becomes too severe. This can include scraping out any narrowing (enarterectomy), or stretching the road wider (angioplasty) and holding it open with a metal stent, or even building a bypass of the damaged area (coronary bypass surgery). If we have severe damage to our blood vessels each of these procedures can be lifesaving and life prolonging.