Effective ways to protect your heart, part 3....

Today's Post: Thursday, 2-24-2011

Last week I posted two times on effective ways to protect you heart in honor of Valentine’s Day.

Since then, I was reminded rather forcefully that I left some things out.

1. One in particular may have close to doubled my own protection.

So, I decided I’d better add them to the two posts last week by doing today’s post about them.

My LDL readings had been running between 96 & 106. Then last time my LDL was 73.

That’s a very large improvement, particularly considering what it took me to go from 130 to the 100 range.

What happened?!

Losing 5 to 10 % of your bodyweight as fat does tend to improve your protection and readings including LDL even if you still have more fat it would be nice and good for you to lose. I lost from 176 to 160 at the beginning of last year. That was a bit over 9%.

So, my initial reaction was that was why my reading was so much better. And, I’m sure it did help.

But I also began to take a daily curcumin supplement and use lots of a curry spice with the turmeric that also contains the curcumin thought to have the health benefits – and, I do so three or four of my dinners every week.

I did that since it increasingly was evident that doing these two things provides very strong protection from Alzheimer’s disease.

Later, I learned it also cut my risk of getting any cancer by quite a bit.

One of the ways curcumin and turmeric do those two things is that they sharply reduce chronic inflammation. And, such chronic inflammation we now know is a major cause of heart disease. It also tends to cause cancer or keep your body from getting rid of it soon enough or both.

So for that reason alone, curcumin & curry belong on the list of things that effectively prevent heart disease.
(Ginger is a relative of turmeric and using it as a spice has similar effects as well.)

But there is more! I ran across Dr Dean Ornish’s new book The Spectrum. His knowledge and information has improved since his early work.

And, in this book he includes supplements and notes that curcumin/turmeric also is a strong antioxidant AND tends to lower your LDL cholesterol.

So, that is well worth including.

2. Vitamin D3 we now know has very similar benefits to curcumin and it helps prevent autoimmune diseases of every kind.

Today, most people work and play inside and rarely get vitamin D from the sun.

Studies have found that our bodies will make productive use of at least 3,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 if it is available.

And, most people are capable of making 20,000 or more iu’s of vitamin D3 when they are exposed to the sun in the summer.

This means the current guidelines for vitamin D issued by the Institute of Medicine are so bad, they a bad joke.

The real minimum daily requirement for vitamin D3 is closer to 2,000 to 3,000 iu a day and it’s clearly safe to take at least 10,000 iu a day.

The results when people have taken that much – 2,00 to 10,000 iu a day in recent studies have been spectacular. Doing so helps prevent Alzheimer’s disease, osteoporosis, many cancers, AND heart disease. (There’s a list of at least a dozen other health benefits of doing so as well.)

Vitamin D helps your body put calcium into growing new bone and to NOT put it in your artery walls!

That means in particular that taking that much vitamin D3, eating foods that contain calcium, and doing weight bearing exercise every week, work dramatically better at preventing osteoporosis than taking calcium supplements.

And, since we just discovered taking calcium supplements DOES tend to put it in your artery walls and cause heart disease and high blood pressure, that is critically important to know about.

3. Drinking green tea and taking green tea extract supplements either has no or very little effect on some of its claimed benefits when people ingest it instead of using it directly on cells in the lab or that is close to the truth.

BUT, there ARE two for sure proven benefits to your health and heart of doing these things.

You can drink green tea instead of regular or diet soft drinks both those that contain caffeine and those that don’t. If you do that, your health and heart get massive protection of multiple kinds!

And, the one benefit for drinking green tea that has tested as strongly supported is that it benefits your heart.

4. The strength of the contractions of your heart and possibly it having the correct rhythm depend on the mitochondria in all your cells including your heart muscle working well.

Your apparent and “real” age do as well. This is because the mitochondria are the power and energy centers for each of your cells.

But they only stay healthy as you get older if you begin to supplement effectively with CoQ10 because it is something your body provides for your mitochondria when you are younger but begin to provide it for them less and less as you get older.

If you do provide CoQ10 effectively for your mitochondria in your cells it slows aging, keeps you more energetic and able, and does the same things for your heart.

Secondly, we now know that taking CoQ10 does this job badly to almost not at all. BUT, if you take the ubiquinol form, your blood level of CoQ10 does go up and stay up enough to do the job. It is between 4 and 10 times more effective than taking the CoQ10 form and the blood tests have proven this to be the case.

Middle aged adults can do well on 50 mg once a day of ubiquinol while older people with existing heart disease may do better on 200 mg three times a day. (I take 100 mg when I first get up and 50 mg with my lunch now.)

People who take statin drugs must take the ubiquinol form and double the dose. It seems some of the worst side effects of statin drugs is because they deplete the CoQ10 in your heart. (That’s one of the reasons why for almost everyone doing the things in these 3 posts is not only safer than taking statins but provides far better heart protection.)

(Note: I tried yesterday to find the section on the Berkeley Heart Lab website that showed that niacin worked more effectively for heart protection for almost everyone in the many types of people they have discovered than statin drugs. I could not find it.

They may have removed it after threats from the drug companies attorneys or just found it didn’t increase their sales and wasn’t needed for that.

I hope to find some more scholarly papers with the information I can point people to now that contain this information for a future post.)

5. The compound resveratrol that is one of the things that makes drinking red wine a bit better for your heart than drinking white wine or other kinds of alcoholic drinks.

The anti-aging effect of taking 100 mg or 200 mg a day of the effective trans form of resveratrol is much lower than expected. (Drinking enough red wine to get that much each day would dramatically overdose you on alcohol and not leave any room for food! Supplements are far safer and more practical. I remember reading it would take drinking 50 bottles a day of red wine!)

But the heart protective effects of taking the resveratrol supplements are quite real and strongly supported by the studies.

So to protect your heart it is worth adding.