Heart Health Toolkit

To link directly to this toolkit from your websites, use this link: [Health.mil/HeartHealthToolkit].

A healthy heart is vital to overall wellness, and critical to readiness and optimizing performance. A healthy heart is vital to overall wellness, and critical to readiness and optimizing performance. Heart disease is responsible for about 600,000 deaths in the United States every year – that’s 1 in every 4 deaths, the most common cause of death before the COVID-19 pandemic. Lowering your risk factors for heart disease is critical to your health, and will help Service Members improve their readiness and mission performance.

• Visit the Heart Health Page for more information about preventing heart disease.
• Find messaging for Healthy Heart and Total Force Fitness

Messages for Communicators

• Knowing the risk factors, warning signs, and symptoms of heart disease is key to avoiding serious health complications, including death, but many people don’t know the signs.
  • High blood pressure, high LDL cholesterol, and smoking are key risk factors for heart disease.
  • Just under half of Americans (47%) have at least one of these three risk factors.
  • Warning signs of heart disease include fatigue, chest pain, shortness of breath, dizziness, among other symptoms.
• There are strong indications that heart disease is more common in service members and veterans.
  • Stress, smoking, post-traumatic stress, and hypertension are known risk factors for heart disease, and are more common in members of the military than the general population.
• The four most common symptoms of heart attacks are chest pain or discomfort; upper body pain or discomfort in the arms, back, neck, jaw, or upper stomach; shortness of breath; nausea, lightheadedness, or cold sweats.
• There are well understood ways of minimizing the risk and impacts of heart disease.
  • Eat a balanced, healthy diet, low in sodium, cholesterol, and saturated fat (the Mediterranean diet is considered an excellent model)
  • Get at least 2.5 hours a week of physical activity
  • Get seven to eight hours of sleep
  • Manage stress
  • Don’t use tobacco and keep alcohol consumption low.

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