Protecting your Heart

There are documented autopsy results done on young adults between 15 and 34 years old who died of external causes which show that damage starts in most people very young. Fatty streaks and raised lesions increase rapidly during that age span and will continue throughout their lives. There are several reasons this happens but the biggest one is diet.

One of the things to be aware of, not related to diet, but of lifestyle is (NSAIDS) nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. They are proven to increase the risk of heart attack and stroke which can have the risks increasing as early as the first week of taking them.

Stress can also be a lifestyle risk factor. Stress if it’s chronic, exposes your body to unhealthy, persistently elevated levels of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Studies have also linked stress to changes in the way the blood clots and yes, you guessed it, not what we want.

Drinking too much alcohol (dose related) causes higher amounts of cortisol to be released altering the brain’s chemistry and shifting the hormonal balance and changes how we respond to stress in a negative way also. Alcohol causes anxiety and panic attacks. All this is bad for our heart.

The biggest known factor to affect your heart health though, is fat, in particular but not restricted to, saturated fat. The waxy, fat-like substance found in all cells of the body is cholesterol. The body makes the cholesterol you need naturally. When you start adding more on a regular basis, (dose dependant) you start hurting your body. Cholesterol is only found in animal foods. Plants don’t have any.

There are two types of lipoproteins ( packages of proteins that travel through the blood stream carrying cholesterol. Low density lipoproteins (LDL) and high density lipoproteins (HDL). HDL is called the “good ” cholesterol- and carries cholesterol from the blood stream to the liver, which is then removed from the body. LDL is called the “bad” cholesterol and contributes to plaque in the arteries. The newer science is saying that having the good cholesterol is not necessarily a good thing….it means you have more of the bad stuff to get rid of.

Just one gram of saturated fat increases LDL by 2%. Cholesterol in animal foods also increases serum cholesterol levels. Decreasing dietary cholesterol decreases serum cholesterol and is the goal. A well done, documented study including 356,222 men between the age of 35 and 57 showed cholesterol levels are directly related to the risk of coronary heart disease and deaths. The more you have, the more you are likely to have heart disease.

Statin drugs can make your blood numbers look good, but they have been shown to decrease cardiovascular events by only 1.2%! That is a false security with too many side effects to really be a good advantage in most cases. Diet, has been shown to reverse heart disease. Again, it’s plants for the winner.

I don’t have the space here, to show you some of the awesome results of eating more plants and less animal foods so if you are interested in some evidence, google Dr. Caldwll Esselstyn or Dr Dean Ornish among many others.

Another piece of evidence was gathered by my instructor, Pam Popper for a documentary which showed the rate of heart and cancer mortality in relationship to diet. She gathered many countries and studied their diet with their rate of documented mortality. It was amazing! The more populations eat animal foods instead of plants, the earlier and the more deaths they had. The shortest version I can give you is the example that in Uganda, they ate an average of 6.4% of calories from animal food and had 49.4 deaths from cancer and 120.8 from heart disease per 100,00. In Hungary they were eating an average of 30.7% calories from animal food and had 328.5 deaths from cancer and 651.3 from heart disease per 100,000. She listed a total of 8 countries (there were many more) to narrow down the evidence that she says weren’t cherry picked as examples and they all showed the same results. The more animal foods these countries are eating, the more deaths in percentages to all most match exactly. Pretty impressive. Another thing shows that when cultures start eating like us, they aren’t immune. They start getting our diseases. It’s a fact and not one dairy and meat industry want us to know. You can’t blame them, they are trying to make a living but the truth has been so distorted that people don’t know what to eat. It’s not good.

Some of the ways we fool ourselves include thinking if everybody is doing it, if we have always done it, it can’t be that bad. Well, we have had heart attacks since the invention of agriculture and more so since those foods have been affordable. In this current age, we have access everywhere and always. Again, It’s dose related. The more we eat it and the less we eat plants, the faster we are likely to experience the bad results.

It is not normal for us humans to have a heart attack. It’s food related. If we care about being alive and healthy, we need to save ourselves. Doctors have very little experience with nutrition and a lot of experience prescribing pills. News is paid for by the big companies (guess who) and couldn’t afford to be on the air if they told the truth….the truth is out there along with many studies made by these very same companies to confuse and fool us. It makes my heat beat faster just thinking about it. We want to believe the things we hear so we do but there are so many untruths.

The good news is that we have easy access to plants also and there are so many people out there making those foods available. They are easy to eat (you don’t even have to cook many of them) and if eaten without oil and sugar, are a natural diet for us. We start looking leaner and feeling more energetic. Start looking into eating more plants. I promise your heart won’t be sorry.

Be well

Pamela A. Popper, PhD., N.D.

Wellness Forum Institute for Health Studies