Click to use the Talking Dictionary 45. Put a Little Love in Your Heart

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45. Smaller than your fist, your muscular heart just goes on and on. It will beat more than 60 times a minute for 70 years or more. Yawn. So what? Most of us take our hearts for granted. Even many hearty people hardly notice their hardy hearts!

Your heart beats 60 times a minute, or 3,600 times an hour. What physical thing can most of us do 3,600 times in one hour? Blink? Maybe, but after a while we'd probably get tired of or bored with the constant blinking. Tap our fingers on the desk? Nope. Jump up and down? Certainly not!

But your heart keeps beating, minute after minute, hour after hour. Every day, it pumps almost 2,000 gallons of blood through our blood vessels. The average bathtub can hold about 50 gallons of water (filled to the top without anyone sitting in the tub). So, your heart pumps about 40 bathtubs of blood every day. Unbelievable. Give your heart a pat on the back!

And, unlike your head or your feet or your back, your heart does all this work without ever complaining! You never know that it's even there. Your heart is such a reliable "silent partner" that people forget to care for it. For many people, the first indication that their heart isn't functioning properly is death—a fatal heart attack! Over 650,000 Americans die annually of some kind of heart disease. Our hearts keep us alive, but they're also our number one killer. Cancer kills 560,000, stroke kills 143,000, and accidents kill 118,000 Americans annually.

Like accidental deaths, many heart disease‐related deaths can be avoided if people simply follow the advice of health practitioners. Unfortunately, many people seem to listen to a little voice in their head that says, "It won't happen to me." So these people keep on smoking and drinking. They keep on eating salty snacks and fatty meat. And they keep on "exercising" by getting off the sofa, walking to the fridge, and grabbing another sugar‐filled soda. 6.6, 337

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