February is Heart Month, a time to highlight on heart disease, the number 1 killer in the US.

The Regional Medical Center Of Acadiana is here to help you take care of your heart along with our sister hospitals Women’s & Children’s Hospital and Dauterive Hospital.

As a Cycle III Chest Pain Center and aTop 100 Hospital in Medical Excellence for Coronary Bypass Surgery and a Top 100 Hospital in Patient Safety for Major Cardiac Surgery for 2012 as rated by CareChex -- A Quality Rating Service of The Delta Group, we are dedicated to your heart health and have put together this collection of resources to help you get started.

It’s hard to get directions if you don’t know where you are.  Take our FREE Heart Health Assessment to find out what your heart age is and which areas you need to focus on to get healthier.

Once you know your hearts age, you can start taking small steps to get where you want to be.  Healthy eating is one of the strongest weapons we have against heart disease.

We have put together a library of heart healthy recipes and information about what a heart healthy diet is to get you started.

But what you eat is only half of the story, being active is another strong weapon we have against heart disease. The American Heart Association recommends we get as little as 30 minutes of exercise a day.  Even if you have never exercised before there are still easy things you can do to get moving such as housework or gardening, but perhaps the simplest, cheapest and most effective kind of exercise for heart health is walking.  According to The American Heart Association every hour of walking adds 2 hours to your life.  That’s huge!  Where do I sign up?

The Regional Health System of Acadiana is a proud START partner.  START is a free online program to help you get active with online tools to help you track your daily exercise and diet.  Visit startwalkingnow.org to learn more about this free program.