This year’s Healthy Heart Day hosted by cardiologist Dr. Shekhar Pandey is focused on healthy aging and what leads people living in one of the world’s five blue zones to live longer and healtheir
As life expectancy in Canada has gone up dramatically over the past 100 years, a local cardiologist said those final extra years are not always the healthiest ones but they could be.
Dr. Shekhar Pandey, lead cardiologist at the Cambridge Cardiac Care Centre, has an ultimate goal of making the city and region a ‘blue zone.’
Blue zones are five identified areas in Greece, Italy, California, Japan and Costa Rica where people consistently live longer and age much more healthily.
How this is achieved is a big part of the upcoming Healthy Heart Day virtual event hosted by Pandey.
The event, now in its 21st year, is meant as a community gathering sharing resources about preventing heart disease, Pandey explained. The event first started after Pandey’s mother-in-law died from heart disease in her late 60s.
He explained she was diagnosed with multiple ailments like diabetes, high cholesterol and high blood pressure the same time she was first diagnosed with heart disease. Therefore, she didn’t get the resources needed to make a personal change.
“If something like that type of tragedy can happen to a cardiologist’s mother-in-law … what’s happening in the general public?” Pandey said.
This year’s event is focused on healthy aging and will kick-off with an examination of these blue zones by Dr. Peter Lin.
Much research is going into determining what exactly it is about these regions that is allowing people to live healthier, longer lives with lower rates of Alzheimer’s, disability and institutionalization but Pandey said some trends have been identified.
“Their diets tend to be often more plant-based diets, they tend to have much less processed foods,” Pandey said, adding the more processed a food is the more nutritional content is lost from it.
Those who live in blue zones also tend to be more active and not just in terms of exercising but are volunteering or otherwise engaged with their communities, Pandey said.
“That’s really important for your brain to keep the brain healthy,” he said. “They have good support systems for managing stress and anxiety and depression.”
Pandey said a lot has been learned about heart disease prevention over the past decades but noted heart attacks remain a leading cause of death and disability on the planet although studies show a majority of heart attacks could be prevented.
Pandey said he’s concerned with some trends including higher rates of nicotine use — either through smoking, vaping or pouches — in the post-pandemic era and lower activity levels among young people.
He’s also concerned with a big uptick in heart disease in women and he’s starting to see it in younger women in their 30s and 40s.
Pandey said his goal is to make Cambridge and the region one of these blue zones, but it will require the community to commit to it.
Dr. Michael Lawrie, co-chair of the event’s planning committee and chair of the P.R.E.V.E.N.T. clinic board, said events like Healthy Heart Day are important because learning how to live healthier is something everyone can be a bit better at.
“You don’t have to run a marathon to become more fit. Walk around the block if that’s what’s going to work for you,” Lawrie said. “Have people feel empowered to take control of their own health, rather than saying ‘I just got so much stress, I eat to ease my stress and I’m too tired at the end of the day to exercise.’ That’s a downward spiral.”
Doug Craig, former Cambridge mayor and current regional councillor, has been a patient of Pandey’s for 20 years and has noticed a growth in patients going to his office in Cambridge. He thinks it will be the little things people do that could push Cambridge into being a blue zone.
“What I learned from all this, why people are living longer is mainly due to cardiac care,” Craig said. “I think that’s a really interesting fact that people can sort of reflect on and how to extend life is to really take care of yourself in terms of a healthy heart.”
The Healthy Heart Day event will be held virtually on Saturday May 3 from 9 a.m. to noon. Learn more and pre-register here.
