Currently, experts have not agreed on the exact number of muscles in the human body, but it is safe to say that there are about 650-850, regardless of whether it’s skeletal, smooth or cardiac muscle, according to enotes.com. Here is the thing: if you were a judge in “the hardest working muscle” contest, which muscle would win your heart? For people who have read the book “Clinical Oral Science” published by Reed Educational and Professional Publishing, 1998, the muscle that takes the grand prize for delivering the greatest amount of pressure is the masseter muscle which powers the jaw to deliver tremendous bite force. However, don’t make up your mind yet until you have read the next paragraph.
When cardiac muscles contracts, writes enotes.com, “it pumps about 2 ounces (59 milliliters) of blood, pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood every single day, beats about 100,000 times per day and about 40 million times a year, and is constantly working over a lifetime”. Except you know any other muscle that posts a more impressive performance and works round the clock, you would have to acknowledge this: the heart is the hardest working muscle.

Yet, regardless of how hard working the heart is, not everybody takes good care of it. For those who do not, the consequences are dire. For starters, Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a media briefing last September, that “three out of four American adults have a heart that’s “older” than their years.” Here is the initial implication of that observation; since the concept of heart age was developed to communicate a person’s risk of dying from the two leading causes of death, disability and health care expenditures- heart attack or stroke; having a heart that is “older” than you raises the risk for deadly duet.

Now let us take a numerical approach to heart age-which is based on a risk profile that includes blood pressure, smoking history, diabetes and body mass index. “Half of U.S. men and nearly half of U.S. women have a heart age that’s five or more years older than their chronological age,” says Dr. Tom Frieden. For instance, a 55 year old woman may find out that her heart age is 74 “because she smokes and has untreated high blood pressure” he added. If this kind of heartbreaking data could be generated in a developed country, a similar study conducted in a developing country with poor basic health facilities would likely generate a heart rending data.

Interestingly, this isn’t a gloom and doom article; behind the dark cloud of the rapidly aging heart, lies this silver lining: If you take the right steps, it is possible to reduce your heart age and consequently live longer and healthier life, free from heart disease and stroke, noted Dr. Gregg Fonarow, a professor of cardiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Next, let’s find out ways to boost heart health.


1.The first heart-friendly step to take is to kick the smoking habit. Smoking increases the risk for heart diseases. Chemicals in cigarette smoke get into the bloodstream and damage the inner lining of the arteries, says cardiologist Donald Lloyd-Jones, MD, ScM, of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
You might want to learn others ways of pampering your ticker on:
http://zemellive.com/is-your-heart-older-than-you/