Heart health
Heart insurance?
From the book “Good Fat, Bad Fat”
If you could buy heart insurance, would you? Your heart is far more complex than any machine, car, computer, or other equipment you may use. In fact, chances are that your heart has already outlasted several cars and computers.
How much longer will it keep going?
Your heart didn’t come with a 10-year warranty or a lifetime guarantee. But you can insure your heart, if you wish. By paying a monthly premium, an insurance company will pay your survivors when your heart quits. Nice for them. But what about you?
What if you could get heart insurance to keep your heart running longer? You need to find a way to extend the life of your heart. You need to know how to increase the quality of your heart’s service to you. You can really enjoy life and eating tasty foods without killing yourself and others in your family with too much fat and cholesterol.
Coronary fat plaques and Heart disease
High triglycerides, low HDL levels and cholesterol/HDL ratios over 4 are major risk factors for heart disease.
Heart attacks are caused due to coronary fat plaques. How are they formed? Fat-plugged coronary arteries will lead to open-heart bypass surgery. Plaques of bad fat form inside the small arteries that supply blood and oxygen to our heart muscle.
Because the heart pumps blood all the time, what difference does it make if one of these little coronary arteries gets plugged? Can’t the heart muscle get it’s oxygen and other nutrients from the blood it is pumping inside itself?
Foods that cause it: Hamburgers, French fries, eggs, butter, sausage, bacon, doughnuts, ice cream, cheese and other high-fat foods form fat plaques in the coronary arteries.
Life style changes for good heart health:
- No more cream. No more rich cheese. Very little meat. Much more fish and seafood. Rigidly limit the amount of bad fat and cholesterol you eat.
- Regular, vigorous exercise.
- That will bring the cholesterol levels down.
- Some may also need the help of lipid-controlling medications.
Diet for heart health
Hamburgers, French fries, eggs, doughnuts, ice cream, cheese and other high-fat foods form fat plaques in coronary arteries.
Eat more fish and limit eating eggs, butter, sausage or bacon, ice cream, cheese, fish and chips.
Dying of heart disease
We cannot say “I’d rather eat what I want and die from heart attack than suffer with something like cancer.”
It is not logical. Look at the following reasons.
- Many die of heart attacks at a very young age. So someone who wants to die of a heart attack instead of cancer may find himself dying in the prime of life.
- Most people who have heart attacks don’t die from them. Usually, they go through considerable pain and misery, spend time in intensive care and frequently suffer the trauma of heart surgery. Then, at best, there are major limitations on what they can do; at worst, a complete change of liftstyle.
- About 15% of people die from their first heart attack, so 85% of people do not die from their first encounter with serious heart disease, they live. Half of the 85% who don’t die still have serious problems: their heart function is so poor that their quality of life decreases greatly. Many cannot continue working at their usual jobs or do many of the important day-to-day activities they are used to doing. To make it worse, 50% of those who have had one heart attack have another one, many from blockages not visible on angiography. New blockages are often caused by clots which occur in rather small fat-rich plaque lesions that suddenly rupture. (However, these fatty deposits (lesions) reverse rapidly when people go on a lowfat diet.)
What Is a Heart Attack?
Let’s go back to the plugging of these little lifeline arteries, which look like small strands of spaghetti. Over the years, fat deposits collect in these little arteries like calcium and grease deposits on the inside of water pipes. As the deposits build up, the passage-way for blood and oxygen gets smaller and smaller.
If the flow becomes partially restricted so the heart muscle doesn’t get enough oxygen, brief episodes of discomfort occur in the chest, called angina. This pain is sometimes a crushing feeling. Other times it may be more like a tightness or a disconcerting pressure. Sometimes angina pain may be felt in the left or even the right arm, the jaw, the back or the abdomen. There also may be shortness of breath and/or dizziness, sweating or nausea.
People with angina eventually learn that a particular strenuous activity, excitement or stress brings on discomfort. Most find that rest and calming influences usually make the angina disappear in a few minutes. A small tablet of nitroglycerin dissolved under the tongue usually helps by dilating the coronary blood vessels, thereby increasing the blood flow and relieving the discomfort.
Fortunately, episodes of angina are relatively short, but when a clot forms in a coronary artery filled with plaque, the problem multiplies. If a complete blockage occurs in one of these little arteries, the result is severe damage to the heart muscle. This is a heart attack - a myocardial infarction. A severe crushing pain occurs in the mid chest as this happens. Pain often progresses down the left arm. This pain doesn’t go away with rest or nitroglycerin. Heart-attack pain lasts for at least a half hour-and often longer.
As oxygen is cut off to an area of heart muscle, another bad thing can occur. Something may go wrong with the heart’s electrical system. The steady electrical impulses that kept the heart beating smoothly are replaced with a wild twitching rhythm called ventricular fibrilla- tion. This irregular and inefficient rhythm doesn’t let the heart pump the blood the way it is supposed to and that creates a life-and-death situation. Electrical shock may be required to restore a normal heart beat, but that does not always work.
At this point, time is of the essence. Every minute counts. When someone has a heart attack, it is vitally important to recognize what is happening and immediately get expert help. Calling 911 in most loca- tions in the U.S. will usually get paramedics on their way in moments. This rapid-response team can provide oxygen and medications on the spot and from there the patient can be transported quickly to a coronary-care unit. If 911 is not an option or if an ambulance has to travel a long distance, it may be better to get to the hospital in the fastest way possible. Some people don’t make it.
If the heart can be kept going, medications usually help strengthen the heart enough so little-by-little the body can re-route blood to the damaged heart muscle through other tiny vessels. Amazingly, this re- routing process, called collateral circulation, keeps many heart-attack victims alive. Sometimes the resulting collateral circulation is pretty good. More often it isn’t anywhere near what it used to be. Patients in this situation are reminded of this from time to time by recurrent angina pain.
We usually don’t have to sit back and just hope the body will cre- ate its own collateral circulation. Plugged arteries can be opened up with precision instruments which are snaked up through the aorta and into the plugged coronary artery from an artery in the thigh. You may be able to watch on a video screen as the surgeon performs one of the various angioplasty procedures in which a tiny balloon or instrument pushes, drills or blasts through the blocked passage. Think of angioplasty as something like unclogging drainage pipes with a rooter machine. To keep an artery open, a tiny steel device called a stent is often slipped into the artery. Amazing!
When there is considerable blockage, another way to get blood to the heart muscle is to make a new passageway around the blockage during bypass surgery. The surgeon makes a graft from an artery that previously supplied blood to the person’s breast or from a vein from one of the person’s legs. In each case the body creates collateral circu- lation for these areas which are not as critical as the heart. While the heart is stopped to put these grafts in, the blood is bypassed through large tubes into an artificial pump that keeps the blood going to the brain, lungs and the rest of the body during the surgery. With the heart stopped, the graft is stitched in, forming a new passageway for blood to flow around each blocked coronary artery. After the heart is restarted, the pump is disconnected and blood once again flows to the damaged heart muscle.
Sometimes it is even possible to put in bypass arterial grafts with- out stopping the heart. Imagine micro-stitching these little arteries while the heart is still pumping! Instead of making a large incision in the chest, a surgeon can sometimes work on the heart through tiny portholes in the skin and chest wall, called keyhole surgery. While problems sometimes occur, this marvelous technology is usually highly effective.
Sadly, even after such marvels of modern surgery, people some- times don’t change the lifelong patterns that led to the plugging of their coronary arteries. Not smart! Or, perhaps in some cases, not informed. Certainly anyone who has undergone bypass surgery or angioplasty or had a heart attack, should immediately change his or her lifestyle patterns that contributed to these blockages.
What are you doing now to keep your coronary arteries from becoming plugged?
Even if you haven’t ever had a heart attack, angioplasty or bypass surgery, the question still applies. It’s good that modern technology is available if you need it, but it’s even better to prevent your arteries from getting plugged up in the first place.
Everyone who has a car knows it’s much easier, less costly and less upsetting to prevent problems than to repair them. What about our hearts? We can prevent much of the plugging that occurs in coronary arteries. In fact, people in most parts of the world don’t get heart attacks. You can be among those who don’t-even living in a culture in which much of the population will spend time in coronary-care units because of fat-plugged coronary arteries.
Even if you already have some fat plaques in your coronary arter- ies, you have a choice every day whether to let the fat plugging get worse, stay the same or do something that has a good chance to make it regress.
You can personally significantly decrease the odds of a heart attack. It requires changing eating and exercising habits. We tell you how in this book.
A heart attack is no fun. It’s gruesome! Don’t fall for the line that you might as well eat lots of fatty junk and die pleasantly from a heart attack. Think about recurrent angina pain. Think about being in an intensive-care unit. And think about having heart surgery-even with the most modern techniques. Then realize you may be able to about avoid all these things.
Instead of rationalizing reasons to keep on eating fat, every morn- ing ask yourself, “What can I do today to prevent more fat from plug- ging my coronary arteries?"
If you want to have clean and open coronary arteries, you can. It’s simple, but not easy.
If you want to change the odds, start living more like the people who almost never have heart attacks. To begin with, that means watching your diet.
Among the leading industrialized nations, the Japanese have the fewest heart attacks. Other cultures with historically little coronary- artery disease include other Asians, Eskimos, Africans, Mediter- raneans and Latin Americans.
The people among these cultures who get heart attacks tend to live and eat the way most people in our culture eat. Of course, we are not suggesting you move somewhere far away. Just take a look at the eat- ing patterns and lifestyles of people who do not get fat plaques in their coronary arteries-called atherosclerosis—and the eating patterns and lifestyles of those who do.
Saturated Fat is One of the Principle Culprits for heart attacks
Tags
TODO
- https://www.today.com/health/diet-fitness/6-things-heart-surgeon-avoids-rcna174287?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
- The heart rate secret: what it reveals about our health – from sleep and alcohol to fight or flight: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/22/the-heart-rate-secret-what-it-reveals-about-our-health-from-sleep-and-alcohol-to-fight-or-flight