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Lifestyle Strategies for Cardiovascular Risk Reduction

  • Nutrition (JP Foreyt, Section Editor)
  • Published:
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Abstract

Daily lifestyle practices and habits profoundly affect the likelihood of developing cardiovascular disease (CVD). Abundant research and multiple recent consensus documents support the role of regular physical activity, not smoking cigarettes, maintaining a healthy body weight, controlling cholesterol levels, and controlling blood pressure to lower the risk of CVD. These strategies also play important roles in avoiding ever developing risk factors. Despite overwhelming knowledge in this area, adherence to lifestyle strategies remains suboptimal. Challenges remain in helping the public to act upon the current knowledge in this area. Recent guidelines for managing cholesterol and blood pressure provide new guidance in these areas. Controversy, however, exists related to specific recommendations in both of these areas. Similar strategies that are applied to adults for improving lifestyle habits and practices to lower CVD risk also apply to children and adolescents. A clear consensus exists that lifestyle strategies play a critical role in preventing, managing, and reducing cardiovascular disease and its risk factors.

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Conflict of Interest

James M. Rippe and Theodore J. Angelopoulos declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Human and Animal Rights and Informed Consent

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Rippe Lifestyle Institute, 215 Celebration Place Suite 300, Celebration, FL, 34747, USA

    James M. Rippe

  2. School of Medicine, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, 32816, USA

    James M. Rippe

  3. Rippe Lifestyle Institute, 21 North Quinsigamond Avenue, Shrewsbury, MA, 01545, USA

    James M. Rippe

  4. Laboratory of Applied Physiology, Department of Health Professions, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, 32819, USA

    Theodore J. Angelopoulos

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  1. James M. Rippe
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  2. Theodore J. Angelopoulos
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Correspondence to James M. Rippe.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Nutrition

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Rippe, J.M., Angelopoulos, T.J. Lifestyle Strategies for Cardiovascular Risk Reduction. Curr Atheroscler Rep 16, 444 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11883-014-0444-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11883-014-0444-y

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