What are the environmental risk factors for heart disease?
When we think about environmental risk factors for heart disease, we often think about things like pollutants in the air. There are environmental pollutants that can increase your risk of heart disease. In particular, the one that we see most often is the one with which we're most familiar and that's tobacco smoke. But other particulates in the air can also raise the risk of heart disease. Clearly the one we need to work most to avoid because it has the most enormous impact on our society, is tobacco smoke, both for the individual smoker, and for people who are otherwise forced to breathe what clearly is a risk to them, second-hand smoke. There are two other environmental factors that I think are worth thinking about. One is that we, in terms of obesity, live in an environment where food is always available, and not only food has calories, but beverages as well. So it's important to think about that environment and to work our way through it as we go about our day planning, thinking about ways to avoid taking in excess calories and calories we don't need and that we're not going to burn, that will put us at risk by making us obese. In addition, we need to find ways to build exercise routines into our environment and convert what is otherwise an unhealthy environment into one that fosters a healthy lifestyle for us.
