Heart of the Matter Last Saturday I visited the British Heart Foundation shop in Okehampton to meet the team running this wonderful store and to congratulate them on winning the BHF's 'shop of the year' award for outperforming 560 other BHF shops in the UK. Lisa Hill is the fabulous lady who runs her fantastic group of dedicated volunteers — she and her team are a genuine class act and it was very special meeting them. Collectively BHF shops raise £30-million a year to support research into heart disease. The BHF overall donates no less than £90-million per annum to fund a thousand different research projects. And action is needed, with far too many of us dying from coronary heart disease. One in six men and more than one in ten women succumb to it each year — that's 74,000 deaths per annum — or 200 people a day. It is the UK's biggest killer and accounts for one in four of all deaths. There is some good news too though — in the UK heart fatalities have been falling quite dramatically recently. Between 2002 and 2012 the number of people dying from a heart attack has halved. Roughly half of this decrease is due to fewer people having attacks and half due to those that do so having an improved chance of survival due to better medical support. Prevention is, of course, preferable to cure and so consider the following. If you smoke — stop (this will also reduce your chance of stroke), cut down on salt (the government has done a great deal to secure reductions of sodium in processed foods already) and watch what you drink. And keep active — through some voluntary work perhaps — the BHF, for example, is always happy to hear from potential new helpers . . .