By Yana Mandeville.

One of the very few women in the world who needn’t have any kind of introduction is yet longing to be heard about a mission she has wholeheartedly been on for many years. The two-time Academy Award winner donated and raised over $20 million dollars for research at the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, and influenced many other Hollywood stars to contribute to the cause. The facts and numbers that Barbra speaks of in this interview in regards to women’s heart disease are staggering, and we set out to help her broadcast the importance of this awareness.

HealthyLivinG: What was the experience that led you to become a force of progress in women’s heart disease?

Barbra Streisand: Gender equality has always been important to me, so I was shocked when I learned there was major gender disparity in heart disease research, funding and treatment. When I learned that for the past 50 years, women’s heart treatment has been largely based on medical research on men—even when a woman’s heart is different than a man’s—I knew I had to get involved and do something to change this. Heart disease is the number one killer of women, killing more women than men and more women than all cancers combined. Even knowing this, women’s hearts continue to be under-researched and misdiagnosed, and often go untreated. Even down to animal research, scientists use only male mice because female mice are too complex. Isn’t that precisely why we should be studying female mice?

Women are now more than 50% of the US population. It’s time we stopped treating them like second-class citizens.

Read the full interview here: http://www.healthylivingmagazine.us/Articles/7180/