YOU WORK OUT REGULARLY. You don’t smoke. Your diet is (at least relatively) in check. You don’t need to worry about heart health at all, right? We don’t want to get all alarmist on you, but you actually should start thinking about it, like yesterday.
“Every day in my office I see patients who have healthy lifestyles, who are doing what we’d think of as the right thing—they’re exercising frequently and watching their weight, they’ve stopped smoking—but yet, they still have a risk of heart disease,” says Lawrence Phillips, M.D., Director of Nuclear Cardiology at NYU Langone Medical Center and member of the American Heart Association’s Board of Directors in New York City.