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Let me take you back to last summer I was on the ferry going from Nanaimo to Vancouver BC, Canada, and with almost 2 hours to kill I went to the gift shop. I have been on many ferry trips like this and browsing the books and magazine racks is one of my favorite ways to pass the time and maybe pick up some new reading material and a snack that will make the rest of the trip pass a little quicker. On this trip, I found a couple of books that really sparked my interest. One of which was a book simply called “Heart” by Johannes Hinrich Von Borstel a German paramedic that was in the process of becoming a cardiologist, and I was hooked. Heart health is something that a good portion of my family has struggled with, my grandpa, for example, had a quadruple heart bypass done the same year I was born. With such a family history I have a keen interest in how I can prevent heart disease in myself as well as helping others that struggle with their heart health, especially my family.
The heart is a truly heroic organ in the body. It’s part of a complex and vital system of the body, and yet it is commonly the source of disease in North America. As seen in the infographic below, Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is common and has a devastating death rate. It affects 1 in 12 Canadians, which is about 2.4 million adults in Canada. So, it’s important to understand the function of the heart as well as how lifestyle and dietary choices that can affect your heart health.
That is where the Book Heart by Johannes Hinrich Von Borstel can be a really important resource. In this book, they cover the anatomy, the common outcomes of CVD, the lifestyle habits that positively and negatively affect heart health and the effects that diet has on our heart. It’s written in such a way that even challenging content is easy to understand. The illustrations throughout the book are simple but informative and link to the topic of each chapter.
There is so much that goes into having a healthy heart, from nutrition and fitness to smoking and the medication that you are taking. Saying this means that there is so much learn and apply to help improve your heart health. This book is a well-rounded resource for those that are looking to improve their heart health with knowledge delivered in such a way that it can be understandable to those without a science degree or previous knowledge of anatomy.
However, there were a few things that were drawbacks that I found. The is some grammar issues that can make the reading a bit disjointed, but this is most likely due to translation issues as the author is from Germany.
If you are looking to learn more about the heart as a way to prevent CVD or as a way to better understand this truly heroic organ, I would recommend that you pick up this book and that there are lots of good tidbits that can be gleaned and applied to your lifestyle to encourage a healthy heart. If you are interested in checking it out, I have included a link below to Indigo book store where you can find where you can pick up a copy for yourself.
