Cheap way to improve your heart health....

Today's post: Friday, 1-16-2009

A large study in the January issue of the American Heart Journal of over 125,000 people admitted with heart attacks found that 72.1 percent of these heart attack patients had LDL readings of 130 & less; and half of the patients with a history of heart disease had LDL levels lower than 100.

And, 54.6 percent of the heart attack patients had HDL readings BELOW 40.

Lastly, only 2, TWO, percent had both LDL of 100 or less and HDL of 40 or more.

So, having your HDL higher than 40 is more protective than having your LDL reading at 100 or less.

And, what is by far MOST protective is
to have BOTH HDL of over 40 and LDL of 100 or so—or less.

We’ve posted often on how eating right and taking sterol supplements is an effective way to lower LDL cholesterol and less expensive and dramatically safer than taking statin drugs. Regular, “Old Fashioned” oatmeal and beans are quite inexpensive; and Natrol’s “Cholesterol Balance” supplement with beta sitosterol is only about $6 a bottle.

However, we now know that the most critical and predictive measure is the ratio of HDL and triglycerides. If your HDL is high and your triglycerides are low, that means that you have very little of the small particle LDL that tends to cause heart disease. Unfortunately if the reverse is true and your HDL is under 40, quite low; and your triglycerides are over 150, let alone far over 150, your heart disease and heart attack risk is high or extremely high.

So, to protect your heart, it would be nice if there were ways to get this double protection.

There ARE three such ways.

1. Get abundant regular exercise each week including some strength training and some interval cardio -- and additional walking if you possibly can. This has been shown to BOTH increase HDL and lower LDL.

2. Eat NO transfats or any kind of hydrogenated oils; ingest no high fructose corn syrup; completely avoid refined grain foods at least 98 % of the time; and go really easy on sugar and eat it rarely – NOT tons of it several times a day. Eat vegetables, other than potatoes; and eat whole fresh fruit in moderation; and no or relatively little whole grain foods for the few carbs you eat. Not eating transfats improves BOTH your HDL and triglycerides; while NOT eating junky, high glycemic carbs lowers triglycerides.

3. This one is the method promised by the title of this post.: Unless you have known liver damage or drink excessively, take a 300 mg tablet of niacin after breakfast each day and another after lunch.

(If your breakfast or lunch is a bit small or you drank a bit more than usual the night before, you may experience a slight flush for about half an hour. But this is harmless and goes away. And, if you drink moderately and eat a reasonable sized meal first and only take ONE 300 mg tablet of niacin, you’ll rarely get it.)
It’s been known for several years that taking niacin is the only thing that not only reduces heart attack risk and also significantly lowers your risk of dying of any cause.

Here’s why that works. I’ve known that taking niacin is one of the few things you can take that will actually increase your HDL; and it’s one of the very few things that you can take that BOTH increases HDL AND lowers LDL. Yesterday I discovered the third reason, taking niacin also lower your triglyceride level.

In fact, it begins to look as if taking niacin may directly lower your level of the small particle LDL that tends to cause heart disease.

And, it is cheap -- at Whole Foods, their brand of real niacin only costs about $6 for 100, or a fifty day supply or 12 cents a day, which works out to less than $4 a month.

(They also sell something that is labeled as “No Flush” niacin. It isn’t. It’s actually inositol hexaniacinate plus 50 mg of chromium. Since it may have similar effects to taking niacin and does indeed tend to not cause flushing even on an empty stomach I personally take two of those a day in addition to my two real niacin doses.

But it costs more; and if you only want take the one that for sure does the job—or just one of the two, stick with the two tablets of real niacin. Their “No Flush” niacin is more like $9 a bottle.

Taking both plus exercising and eating right helps give me HDL well over 60 and triglycerides of well under 100—over 90 and under 50 when I last got them tested.)