Habits Quietly – Doctors and health professionals deliver a stark message about everyday choices
Habits Quietly Killing Your
By Sharon N Simon
Heart disease isn’t a sudden intruder; it is a silent squatter that moves into the lives of Antiguans and Barbudans one daily choice at a time. This was the sobering reality delivered to a standing-room-only crowd at the Sir Lester Bird Medical Centre on Thursday evening.
Speaking at a public lecture hosted by the Heart and Stroke Foundation, President and Founder Dr. Georgette Meade warned that the nation’s health crisis is being built quietly behind closed doors, long before the first symptoms ever appear.
The event, themed “Optimizing Heart and Brain Health: Everyday Choices, Lifelong Impact”, was held in person and streamed online. Four presenters took the stage, each tackling a different dimension of cardiovascular health — and together they painted a picture of a region at a crossroads.
Dr. Monica Osborne-Stevens, Treasurer of the Foundation, opened with a story from her own clinical practice — a diabetic patient who spent years telling her he was following her advice, until his wife finally set the record straight in the consultation room. Years later, that same patient lost a limb. The story was not told for drama; it was told as a mirror.
Dr Meade then walked the audience through the science of how excess sugar inflames arterial walls, raises blood pressure, and accelerates cognitive decline. She cited a 2017 Framingham study showing that people who consumed two or more sugary drinks daily experienced measurable decreases in total brain volume.
Antigua and Barbuda’s diabetes prevalence, she noted, stands at 11.6 percent — above the global average — and 60 percent of Caribbean youth already exceed the World Health Organisation’s daily sugar recommendation. “Sugar is not your friend,” she told the room. “Water is your friend.”
Dublin moved through six habits damaging the heart — excessive sodium, sugar, unhealthy fats, ultra-processed foods, poor snacking, and too little movement — grounding every point in the reality of a Caribbean diet that consumes more than double the WHO’s recommended daily sodium. Her prescription was unglamorous and effective: cook at home, read labels, plan your snacks, and start with one change rather than 10.
Next, Dr Tadia Smith took the podium with a clinical portrait of what chronic stress and sleep deprivation actually do to the body: elevated cortisol, persistent inflammation, hormonal disruption, and a heart that over time simply cannot keep up. She described stress and poor sleep as feeding each other in a loop, each one making the other worse. She asked the audience to stand and say to the person beside them: “stress kills”. Then she asked them to stand again, and together the room recited the Serenity Prayer — a moment that landed differently after an hour of hard numbers. Dr. Smith, Friend of the Foundation, reinforced the evening’s clinical themes, adding depth to the picture of how cardiovascular damage compounds quietly over years.
The evening closed — not with statistics but with silence — or something close to it. Sumita Balooja guided the room through two breathing exercises: a hand-on-heart belly breath and a box breathing technique, tracing an invisible square in the air, inhaling, holding, exhaling, holding.
In a room that had just spent ninety minutes confronting the cost of daily habits, the collective exhale felt earned.
The Heart and Stroke Foundation of Antigua and Barbuda can be reached at or +1-268-732-3861.
