Special news on heart health....

Today's post: Tuesday, 2-24-2009

I’ve posted several times on the news that I heard at a lecture I went to on news in preventing heart disease.

It’s now well known that the ideal is to have HDL cholesterol well over 60 and for sure over 40 and to have LDL cholesterol of about 100 & for sure well under 160 for good heart attack protection.

Doctors also have known that it’s the small particle LDL that is literally so small it fits into the chinks in your artery walls that causes heart disease. (The reason for NEVER ingesting hydrogenated oils or transfats is because doing so increases this kind of LDL in your blood and begins to cause cardiovascular disease.)

But until I heard that doctor from Stanford Disease Prevention speak, I’d not heard that you could get a very accurate idea of how much of this stuff you have in your blood by measuring the ratio between your HDL and triglycerides. Simply put, if your HDL is low, 25 for example and your triglycerides are really high, 400 say, you have an extremely high risk for heart attack and other cardiovascular disease because your blood has a very large amount of small particle LDL. Conversely if you have 60 or more HDL and 100 LDL or less you have relatively little small particle LDL in your blood & your risk of heart attack and cardiovascular disease is also low.

HERE’S THE NEWS: In the last few days I got two pieces of information about this I thought worth sharing with you right away.

1. A doctor Michael Cutler says that this ratio of HDL to triglycerides is the most effectively predictive measure now known for measuring heart attack risk & that a study done at Harvard found that people with low HDL and high triglycerides had 16 times the risk of a heart attack as people who had high HDL and low triglycerides. (Given what we now know about what this ratio measures, this is no surprise. But it this study has experimental verification that this is so. The theory and logic say it should be so. But this proves that it IS so.

2. Here’s the good news part. There are a number of ways to increase your HDL and a number of ways to lower your triglycerides. (We list several of those later in this post.) But wouldn’t it be nice if there was ONE inexpensive supplement that would both increase your HDL and lower your triglycerides too?

There IS one.

Dr Al Sears has a free health email he sends out you can subscribe to at www.alsearsmd.com .

In a recent issue, he states that taking niacin increases HDL and lowers LDL as well and that taking niacin is one of the most effective known ways to increase your HDL.

That’s been well known for some while now.

But he adds that it also lowers triglycerides about as well as it increases your HDL.

(He also says that niacin increases NO release that promotes good artery health and produces relaxed arteries that allow better blood flow.)

To me this is front page news. Since niacin increases HDL – AND it lowers triglycerides, that means it directly lowers small particle LDL and lowers your risk of heart disease.

I’ve been taking 300 mg after breakfast and 300 mg after lunch each day of niacin that I buy for something like $6 a bottle from Whole Foods for quite a while since I knew doing so was helpful.

But this new information reveals taking niacin may be one of the most important things I do to protect my health and avoid heart disease. THAT I did not yet know.

(Taking just 300 mg twice a day of niacin is reasonably safe although taking a lot more, more than 1,000 mg a day, can impair liver function, so I only take that much. And, by taking it AFTER a decent sized meal and not taking more, though I sometimes get some flushing it’s mild and only lasts a few minutes.)

Other ways to increase your HDL and other ways to lower your triglycerides and thus reduce the amount of small particle LDL in your blood.:

There are two ways that do both as we now know taking niacin does.

1. Regular exercise increases LDL and is also known to reduce small particle LDL in your blood so it clearly also reduces triglycerides.

(Exercise is safer to do if you build up to it carefully and do it regularly at least some every week. And it’s far safer to do if you are taking the other steps to increase your HDL and lower your triglycerides in addition.)

2. Never ingest anything made with hydrogenated oils, period. It’s about twice as bad for your heart as taking niacin and exercise both is good for it.

(Because zero transfats on the label allows for up to 0.49 grams per serving and most people eat multiple servings and totally hydrogenated oils, “interesterified oils,” are even worse but have no transfats, you need to avoid anything that has transfats listed as more than zero OR any hydrogenated oils even if the label says zero transfats.)

3. You can also increase your HDL by drinking red wine moderately and by taking lecithin or other supplements that have choline and by eating extra virgin olive oil instead of oils high in omega 6 oil such as canola, corn, soy, and safflower oils.

4. And you can lower your triglycerides by taking DHA, and omega 3 oil supplements from purified fish oil and eating fish such as wild caught salmon and sardines that are high in omega 3 oils and by eating extra virgin olive oil instead of oils high in omega 6 oil such as canola, corn, soy, and safflower oils.

You can also lower your triglycerides by eating onions and garlic often and/or by taking deodorized garlic supplements.

Lastly, you can lower triglycerides by minimizing the amount of sugar you eat and to stop eating refined grain foods and ingesting high fructose corn syrup in anything it’s now found in.

What do you get if you do all of the above? You get high HDL and low triglycerides.

My HDL has been testing over 90 and my triglycerides as under 50 by doing all these things.

That means my heart attack risk is unusually low.

And, now I know that the niacin I’ve been taking is even more important than I knew it was.