Heart disease is the number one killer of human beings in the United States of America. If heart disease killed any more people per year than it already does, it would have to stop being described as an epidemic or a pandemic, and would have to be reclassified as an instrument of genocide. Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler were never this efficient at wiping people off of the face of the Earth. And the saddest part about heart disease is that it is often our own fault. While a cardiac arrhythmia may not be something that we have any particular control over, a clogged artery is really all the doing of the person it afflicts.
When you have an arrhythmia, your heart does not beat according to a set plan. While being disorganized is great if your career choice is to be a rock musician, a heart needs to beat in a rhythm that any band would respect. The average heart will beat many billions of times across a long life. Your grandparents have most likely shared over a billion heart beats with one another. Thus, an arrhythmia is the kind of heart disease that is as unpredictable as what Ozzie Osborne is going to do when he gets high. And since you need a continuing heart beat in order to keep on living, this is a very bad thing. As a malfunction of your heart's electrical system, there is not much blame to be passed around for any arrhythmia that you might have. Often, this particular type of heart disease is far more due to genetic factors than to environmental ones.
A clogged artery, however, is a completely different story altogether. When you have a clogged artery, there are several factors which are at work, and conspiring to put you into an early grave – as if going to a later grave is such a superior option. While delaying what many consider to be inevitable is great, a heart attack is the result of having a build up or plaque inside of your arterial walls, which is produced in two major ways. The first way is that fatty deposits collect on tiny openings in your arteries and are then built upon with calcium deposits by your platelets. The other way of achieving a clogged artery is very similar, but it involves your arteries becoming inflamed. The irony is that in both cases, the very mechanism which is supposed to help you to heal is what can kill you.
What causes heart disease? One major way is through the eating of solid fats (trans fats and saturated fats), which can turn a regular artery into a clogged artery in a hurry. Another popular way by which you can acquire heart disease is to avoid exercise. Abundant research has shown that in people who exercise for at least a few hours a week (even if it is just a decent amount of exertion for half an hour per day) have a far lesser risk of heart disease than people who do not. And of course, there is always just "the luck of the draw," and having bad genes.
