Clean living can slash your risk for heart disease even if your genes are heavily stacked against you. A large study finds that people with the most inherited risk cut their chances of having a heart attack or other heart problems in half if they didn’t smoke, ate well, exercised and stayed slim. The opposite also is true: You can largely trash the benefit of good genes with unhealthy habits. It’s long been known that genes and lifestyle affect heart risk, but how much influence each one has, and how much one factor can offset the other, are unknown. Researchers combined information on more than 55,000 people in four studies around the world. One included imaging to check for plaque building up in heart arteries. Participants were checked for 50 genes related to heart risks and placed in five groups based on how many they had. They also were sorted into three groups by healthy lifestyle factors — not being obese, exercising at least once a week, eating a healthy diet and not smoking. The favorable lifestyle group had at least three of these four factors; the unfavorable group had one or none. The results: people with the most gene risk had nearly twice the chance of developing heart problems than people in the lowest gene risk group did. Roughly the same was true for those in the unfavorable lifestyle group versus the favorable one. But the interesting part was the difference in risk when gene and lifestyle factors were combined. When researchers looked at the imaging results, genetic and lifestyle factors matched how much artery plaque was seen. Again, a healthy lifestyle mitigated the damage from flawed genes.