A one-two punch
Beating heart disease with healthy living and medication

While healthy living and modern medicines offer effective heart benefits, it's the combination of the two that's lifesaving for many people. Even modest improvements in your habits-eating healthier, losing weight, quitting smoking, monitoring blood sugar and exercising nearly every day-can significantly reduce your heart disease risk. Similarly, patients have an array of effective medications for controlling cholesterol, blood pressure and diabetes. Using both approaches will help you mount the best attack on heart disease.

The first defense
Ask your doctor for personal guidelines to help you:
Improve your diet. Eat a variety of foods, including moderate amounts of lean meats and low-fat dairy products and lots of fiber, fish, fresh fruits and vegetables. Other important components include soy, antioxidant vitamins, folic acid, vitamins B6 and B12 and garlic. Try to keep your sodium intake to no more than 1,500 milligrams daily. That's about one teaspoon of salt.
Exercise more. Check with your doctor first and start slowly, but aim for at least 30 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity on most days of the week. 
Kick the habit. There's no way around it: Smoking puts a heavy burden on the heart, making it beat faster, constricting blood vessels, decreasing blood flow and raising blood pressure. What's more, it inhibits your ability to exercise and makes the blood more likely to clot. Ask your doctor about resources to help you quit.

Your second front
Sometimes these important lifestyle improvements are simply not enough to prevent or reduce heart disease or its risk factors, and your doctor may recommend one or more medications. He or she may prescribe daily aspirin therapy or another blood thinner to reduce the tendency of your blood to clot.

Despite improved diet and exercise, your blood pressure or cholesterol may remain dangerously high, warranting drug therapy. If you've been diagnosed with heart disease and your LDL (bad) cholesterol remains higher than 100 mg/dL, your doctor will likely prescribe medication as well as lifestyle changes.

In the absence of diagnosed heart disease, your doctor may advise drug therapy if your LDL is greater than 130 mg/dL after lifestyle changes. What's more, the American Heart Association suggests that high-risk women use cholesterol-lowering drugs even if their LDL is lower than 100 mg/dL.

Hypertensive drugs can treat high blood pressure. Diuretics reduce excess fluid in your body, leaving a smaller volume of blood and exerting less pressure on your blood vessels. Beta-blockers slow heart rate and reduce its force. Angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors and angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARB) can help relax blood vessels.