Heart Disease, Leading Cause of Death
Most of us have probably already lost multiple people in our life from this disease, and it has caused many of the younger generation to live much shorter lives than that of their parents.
We must look at what we are doing different, and the largest changes seem to be, stress, physical activity, and diet. We have also been advised to eat low fat foods, which is a farce. The problem with fat happens when we get a spike in sugar levels when consuming a high fat meal. They are finding now that the real culprit to our cardiopulmonary system is sugar.
Culprits of Heart Disease: Hypertension- too high LDL Cholesterol- Obesity- Diabetes- Stress- side effects of Cigarettes. The first 5 are oft times preventable and treatable through diet, exercise, weight reduction and staying at a good weight, we all know how to lower the effects of cigarettes…STOP.
Tips:
If you feel your blood pressure rising: take a slow walk, or some slow continuous state exercise or activity. This will start warming your blood and works as a vasodilation (relaxation) of your blood vessels allowing for better blood flow thus lowering blood pressure.
If you have high cholesterol: Eat foods high in Omega 3 and heart healthy fats such as flaxseeds, soybeans, pumpkin seeds, pecans, walnuts, tuna, salmon, mackerel and herring. Also start eating foods high in soluble fiber, such as legumes, seeds, beans, vegetables and fruits, eat these especially with high fat meals. Soluble fiber helps lower cholesterol by carrying out bile through our stool.
Note: your body produces bile to digest fats, and the soluble fiber keeps it from absorbing back into your system so that you pass it out through your waste. This forces your body to make more bile, and your liver makes new bile salts with guess what…. “Cholesterol!”
Important: keep in mind that you are made up of cells and every cell in your body needs cholesterol for proper function, keeping cells from crystalizing, bile production for digestion, hormone production, helps nerves communicate with each other, combination of UV light from the sun and cholesterol in the skin helps make vitamin D. This list could continue, but I’m sure you get the point.
Obesity: Exercise and stay active. Stay away from sugary foods and drink, also stay away from high calorie intake prior to periods of inactivity- as your body stores energy it doesn’t need in your fat cells.
Diabetes: Most of the diabetes we hear about is Type 2 and most times is brought on by a sugary, starchy, high carb diet and lack of physical activity. Insulin spikes resulting from sugar spikes cause lesions and plaque in the arteries, this is responsible for hardening of the arteries and for cholesterol sticking to the arteries.
Stress: Try to stay stress free. Stress puts a load on the systems of our body that we’re not meant to continue to carry and makes it so they cannot work properly, “whether mental or physical.” If you’re going through stressful times or situations, “it’s crucial that you find your de-stressing niche! Meditation techniques are helpful and btw whether a believer or not prayer has been proven to help. When you’re stressed and worried, prayer combined with faith simply feels good when you can hand it over to Someone that you know can and wants to handle it. What works for someone else may not work for you, so find out what it is that can totally engage mind and body. Oft times when you come back to the situation, it will not have control over you, but -you over it!
Cigarettes: If you smoke cigarettes, quit! If you buy cigarettes to smoke, you are paying and taking the time to hurt yourself by inhaling toxic chemicals that hurt the lining of your arteries. It also makes your lungs look like the inside of a smokestack and are putting in jeopardy the most important thing for life support, (your capability for oxygen intake and uptake).
Medicine can be a very important part of intervening between us and chronic disease but keeping medicine ahead of lifestyle changes for any chronic disease is like staying tethered to a tow truck after you’re out of the ditch and the longer you stay tied to it the more counterproductive the tow truck becomes; it simply doesn’t work and this backwards way of doing things will eventually cause other problems. When you take medicine, your body must recover or deal with two things, and the longer you stay on the medicine, the more likely you will suffer from the potential side effects on the warning label.
Our heart pumps around 20 quarts of blood per minute (at rest) and will pump a total of around 1.5 million gallons of blood (into a network of approximately 50,000 miles of blood vessels) every year for us! When it stops, we stop, so let’s take care of this life-giving pump inside our chest!
