A stroke is a medical condition in which poor blood flow to the brain causes cell death. There are two main types of stroke: ischemic, due to lack of blood flow, and hemorrhagic, due to bleeding. Both cause parts of the brain to stop functioning properly. Signs and symptoms of a stroke may include an inability to move or feel on one side of the body, problems understanding or speaking, dizziness, or loss of vision to one side. These are the best ways to prevent a stroke.
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The symptoms are typically acute and immediate doctoral intervention is necessary to keep the person alive. Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to mitigate stroke and other health problems later on. Since a stroke typically entails a life of very bad habits and a progressed age, you will not often see stroke before the age of 60. This means you have time to change your habits to prevent this problem later on. However, it also means that your bad habits can all at once catch up to you without you even realizing it.
Best Ways to Prevent Stroke
1. Diet Better
The best way to prevent stroke is by eating better foods and improving your overall diet. Healthy eating can lower your risk of a stroke and help you shed weight if you need to. Load up on fresh fruits and veggies (broccoli, Brussel sprouts, and leafy greens like spinach are best) every day. Choose lean proteins and high-fiber foods. Stay away from trans and saturated fats, which can clog your arteries. Cut salt, and avoid processed foods. They’re often loaded with salt, which can raise your blood pressure, and trans fats.
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If you are looking at a particular dieting plan to help your overall health, it would be the ketogenic diet. While it sounds like old news, it certainly is the best diet, even if many find it a challenge to maintain. This diet helps you eliminate carbs and sugars entirely from your diet, and you can find plenty of recipes online. The only challenge is removing certain food groups from your diet for at least a short-term period. If you want the long-term benefits though, you have to keep it going. With time, the benefits will outweigh the downsides, as eating healthy becomes much easier.
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The best thing you can do is start slow, but try to begin as early as possible. Otherwise, you should simply try to have a well-balanced diet. All you should do is try to eat foods that are low in sugar and carbohydrates, as this will help prevent weight gain. If you eat them occasionally, that is fine, but keep it to a minimum. Make sure to get your macro and micronutrients in, and with time, things will become easier over time. Just be aware that, even if you do not gain weight, does not mean that you should not consider your eating habits. There are plenty of things you can be doing to help yourself, given anyone’s chance of stroke. If you got a stroke, it means that you were probably doing at least one thing wrong.
2. Intermittent Fast
Intermittent fasting is arguably the best way to prevent a stroke because of it’s protective properties. It is also easily accessible to most people. Not only this, it can save you money and stress later on down the line. You see, most people eat too much too often. All you really have to do is cut down the amount of times you eat in a day, and everything else gets sorted out.
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Fasting can prevent stroke, heart attack, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and more. The process of autophagy is the main reason. This is where you body cleans out old and damaged proteins that accumulate into long-term damage. This means your body has a change to lean itself instead of relying on the mostly damaging qualities of food during digestion. Any kind of fasting is fine, but it all boils down to the same thing. There is also prolonged fasting which has even more benefits, but it requires more food abstinence. This is where you can really begin to see benefits, albeit, with a price to pay in hunger. The more you fast, the easier it becomes, and it should be worth it if you care for your long-term health.
Best Ways to Prevent Stroke
3. Keep Your Heart Healthy
An irregular heartbeat, called atrial fibrillation (AFib), is behind some strokes caused by blood clots. AFib makes blood pool in your heart, where it can clot. If that clot travels to your brain, it can cause a stroke. You can have AFib because of high blood pressure, plaques in your arteries, heart failure, and other reasons. Medications, medical procedures, and surgery can get your heart back into normal rhythm. If you don’t know if you have AFib but feel heart flutters or have shortness of breath, see your doctor.
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It’s also important to be aware of your overall heart health. While keeping an eye on irregular heart health is important and crucial, it is not the whole picture. Knowing how to keep your heart healthy is important in it’s own right, and it is important to understand causes and other effects. The more you keep an eye on yourself and keep yourself healthy overall, the more you can prevent heart and brain problems as well.
4. Stop Drinking Alcohol
Too much alcohol can raise your blood pressure and your triglycerides. Limit yourself to no more than two drinks a day if you’re a man and one drink if you’re a woman. Drinking too much can cause AFib, too — binge drinking (downing 4-5 drinks within 2 hours) can trigger an irregular heartbeat. Not to mention all of the other downsides of alcohol consumption, which are numerous. While it is okay to drink alcohol in moderation, it is certainly not recommended, especially if you have an underlying condition. Be aware of your health before consuming alcohol, as many folks take a blind eye to it under most circumstances.
Best Ways to Prevent Stroke
5. Do Not Smoke
You double your risk of a stroke if you use tobacco. Nicotine in cigarettes raises blood pressure, and carbon monoxide in smoke lowers the amount of oxygen your blood can carry. Even breathing secondhand smoke can raise your chances of a stroke. Tobacco can also raise your levels of a blood fat called triglycerides and lower your levels of “good” HDL cholesterol.
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An additional disadvantage is that it can make your blood sticky and more likely to clot. Smoking is very likely to cause plaque buildup and thicken and narrow blood vessels by damaging their linings. This is by you should be sure to talk with your doctor about ways to quit smoking. Nicotine patches and counseling can help. Don’t give up if you don’t succeed the first time, and understand that it is not just about the tobacco. If you are smoking a vape, you can also deal with similar problems, as nicotine is the main culprit here.
6. Exercise
Being a couch potato can lead to obesity, high cholesterol, diabetes, and high blood pressure — a recipe for stroke. So get moving. You don’t have to run a marathon. It’s enough to work out 30 minutes, 5 days a week. You should do enough to make you breathe hard, but not huff and puff. Talk to your doctor before you start exercising, but it should not be of much concern. You really cannot find much better than exercising for all of your health needs.
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As long as you are working out for at least 150 minutes every week, you should be in good shape. Pairing cardiovascular exercise with resistance training is also a good choice. If you train the muscles, you become stronger and can lose more weight easier if you gain lean muscle mass. Just be sure to exercise carefully, as one wrong move can land you a torn muscle. Since these kinds of exercise make a great pair, you should consider doing it as a part of your schedule.
Best Ways to Prevent Stroke
7. Prevent Diabetes
High blood sugar can make you 2-4 times more likely to have a stroke. If it’s not managed well, diabetes can lead to fatty deposits or clots inside your blood vessels. This can narrow the ones in your brain and neck and might cut off the blood supply to the brain. If you have diabetes, check your blood sugar regularly, take medications as prescribed, and see your doctor every few months so they can keep an eye on your levels.
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While it is hard to get type 2 diabetes and takes years of self-abuse, you should try to avoid it outright. This means that you should avoid insulin resistance from the start. Insulin resistance is the precursor to diabetes and even Alzheimer’s disease. Most people do not even know they have it, and it is an extremely prevalent issue in the modern day. Since I am sure that we all want to avoid it, it is simply a matter of knowing how to avoid it. Being willing to avoid high sugar and carb foods is a must. This can lead to obesity, and being overweight simply makes the problem worse and harder to deal with. Do your best to moderate your food intake, trying your best to avoid excessive carbs and getting your good nutrients.
8. Watch Your Cholesterol
Too much of this can clog your arteries and lead to heart attack and stroke. Keep your numbers in the healthy range: total cholesterol: under 200 mg/dL of blood. You should also be sure to keep your LDL (bad) cholesterol under 100.mg/dL and HDL (good) cholesterol above 60 mg/dL. If diet and exercise aren’t enough to keep your cholesterol in check, your doctor may recommend medication. Since your cholesterol has much to do with a healthy diet, you should be okay if doing a decent dieting plan. Exercise is also a great way to help regulate your cholesterol levels as well, and by doing this, you help mediate stress.
Best Ways to Prevent Stroke
9. See Your Doctor
If you’ve already had a stroke, make sure to take any medicine your doctor gives you to help prevent another one. At least 25% of people who have a stroke stop taking one or more of their drugs within 3 months. That’s especially dangerous because that’s when you’re most likely to have another one. While taking medication is important, it is also important to know what you are taking.
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In combination with other medications or even supplements, a medication can become dangerous. You should be sure that everything is taken into consideration, especially if you are seeing multiple doctors. Be sure to see your doctor for a checkup and list any problems you may have noticed. If you notice a problem, you should see a doctor anyway, but it is important to list everything and be honest. This is where doing your own research comes into play as well, but you should always talk with your doctor. Doing so will help keep you from making a potentially fatal mistake with your health.
10. Aspirin
A low-dose aspirin every day may prevent strokes and heart attacks in people at higher risk. It acts as blood thinner, preventing blood clots from forming in arteries partly blocked by cholesterol and plaque. It’s not for everyone, though, so don’t start taking aspirin without talking to your doctor first. And don’t give someone an aspirin if they’re showing signs of stroke like slurred speech or a drooping face. It can make a hemorrhagic stroke worse. Instead, call 911 right away.
11. Sleep
Getting enough sleep is crucial to keeping your brain healthy. If you skip on sleep, you are far more likely to struggle with a stroke later on. Having to constantly catch up on sleep raises the increase of acute stroke and can cause long term problems. This is especially true if you are doing it all of the time. This is where time management comes to play, where learning to focus helps, too.
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Even if you feel like it is not a problem, it is something that can always be improved. Trying to mitigate stress is numero uno, because constant worry and anxiety are the main culprits here. Diet and exercise can also come into play here as well, as a lack of sleep can cause poor performance and further stress. While it may sleep like it is beating a dead horse, sleep is key to health no matter how you look at it.
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While sleep is a consideration, it is also about how you sleep that can make a difference. Loud, constant snoring may be a sign of a disorder called sleep apnea, which can make you stop breathing hundreds of times during the night. It can boost your chances of a stroke by keeping you from getting enough oxygen and raising your blood pressure. This can in turn cause complications later on beyond your control. You should be aware of this problem so you can do something about it immediately. The best way to sleep is on your back, but most people do not keep it this way throughout the night. Just be aware of the way you sleep affecting your posture as well, which can affect your neck and blood flow to the brain.
Best Ways to Prevent Stroke
12. Stress Relief
Since it is no mystery that stress is important to keep low, I am going to keep this short. Stress can cause you to lose sleep and eat more. Eating while you are stressed can prevent you from understanding your own appetite while attracting you to sweeter foods. If you do not get sleep, you will become more stressed, and this stress can further cause sleep problems.
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As you can see, everything can cause stress, and stress can cause a lot of things as well. The best things you can do is try to keep your anxiety and overthinking to a minimum. If something is stressing you out, try your best to avoid obsessing about it. This kind of thinking will get you into trouble and serves no suitable function. Other things that can help with this is by trying to be productive without overdoing it, which can also help you relax. Feeling good about yourself is key, and things like diet and exercise are great ways to gain this.
13. Keep Your Blood Pressure Low
High blood pressure is the No. 1 cause of strokes. It’s the reason for more than half of them. A normal blood pressure reading is lower than 120/80. If yours is regularly above 130/80, you might have high blood pressure, or hypertension. If it’s not managed well, high blood pressure can make you 4-6 times more likely to have a stroke. This is because it can thicken the artery walls and make cholesterol or other fats build up and form plaques. If one of those breaks free, it can block your brain’s blood supply.
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High blood pressure also can weaken arteries and make them more likely to burst, which would cause a hemorrhagic stroke. If you have high blood pressure, work with your doctor to keep your pressure in the healthy range. Medication and lifestyle changes, such as regular exercise and eating healthy, can help. If you struggle with anxiety, try to understand the source of the problem and fix it. It always takes time and everyone deals with it to a degree, but it does you no good. As long as you are taking small and consistent steps in the right direction, you should be okay.
14. Supplements
There are some good supplements out on the market if you need any additional help with your health. There are even some anti-stroke focused herbs and proprietary supplements you can find online or in-store. While you should focus mostly on other lifestyle choices, supplements are good too. It never hurts to help make a difference with a supplement to help you go to sleep or even reduce hunger.
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Being sure to take vitamin D, C, and even some herbal teas is a good way to keep it easy and a part of your diet. All of these little things can go a long way, but be sure to pair it with a good diet and exercise. If you do not, you may end up not getting the most out of the supplement. A supplement cannot make enough of a difference on it’s own, so be sure to take this into consideration.
Best Ways to Prevent Stroke
