For a healthy heart, even faking happiness helps

You’ve heard it before: to avoid a heart attack don’t smoke, eat right and exercise. But it also may help to be happy, a new study says.

Even if you’re grumpy by nature, just try to be cheerful. Researchers at Columbia University rated the happiness levels of more than 1,700 adults in Canada with no heart problems in 1995. After a decade, they examined the 145 people who developed a heart problem and found happier people were less likely to have had one.

The study was published online on Thursday in the European Heart Journal. “If you aren’t naturally a happy person, just try acting like one,” said Karina Davidson of Columbia University Medical Center, the paper’s lead author. “It could help your heart.”

Researchers said their study was the first to show an independent relationship between positive emotions and coronary heart disease, but stressed that more work was needed before any treatment recommendations could be made.

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