More Valentine's Day tips: -- on protecting your heart....

Today's Post: Thursday, 2-17-2011

Monday was Valentine’s day.

It’s icon is the red heart design.

It’s theme is love.

Love can be caring, affection, warmth, and a good relationship with someone special to you. So Valentine’s day is about that kind of love

Since sex often works best in such relationships or starts them, Valentine’s day is often about sex.

(Tuesday’s post was about ways to get healthier that improve your sex life and help you keep it.:

“The wonderfully good news is that virtually everything that you do to improve or protect your health with eating right, exercise, taking key supplements, and losing fat or staying trim both improves your sex life and allows you to keep it for years or even decades longer.”

It’s worth reading since virtually everything we suggest in that post also protects your heart.)

And, since you literally feel affection physically at times in the chest or while hugging someone one you love, for hundreds of years love has been associated with the heart. The American Heart Association often promotes heart health in February for this reason.

This is the post I promised on Monday about protecting your heart (That’s important for the first two parts also since a healthy heart allows you to stay around longer for the love that’s caring, affection, warmth, and a good relationship with someone special to you. AND having a healthy heart is a key way to have better sex.)

There is a good news/bad news aspect to protecting your heart.

The good news first:

There are over a dozen things you can do to protect your heart. Some of them are actually easy to do and many of the rest are relatively doable and easy to keep doing once you make them a regular part of your life.

Many of these things are astoundingly powerful also. Some make getting any kind of cardiovascular disease half as likely. Doing six of them may only make it 75% as likely. But by gradually adding more you can get to over 90% in my opinion. Some, like completely avoiding tobacco smoke and being consistently nice to people most of the time prevent heart attacks from happening even if you have some cardiovascular disease. And, some, like losing excess fat if you are obese or have a very large waist even though you are only overweight, make it more likely you will survive if you do have a heart attack.

But the ones to focus on are the first group since they remove the CAUSES of heart disease.

Lastly, if you do the things that protect your heart, ALL of your health improves. You age more slowly. You are far less likely to get or stay a type 2 diabetic. You are less likely to get either Alzheimer’s disease or vascular dementia. And, your cancer risk will also fall at least in half.

The bad news is easy. There are so many ways that work to protect your heart, it can be a challenge initially to learn them all and do most of them. And, some -- such as losing excess fat – may be challenging for you to do well, at least at first.

But, if you do all the ones you can do and find easy, you can slash your risk of heart disease. You can work at adding the rest gradually as your are able to do.

Two of the most important are:

to avoid tobacco smoke both from smoking AND from second hand smoke.

& getting regular, vigorous exercise – both strength training and interval cardio – each week and on most days.

(See last Tuesday’s post for details on those two as we cover them well there.)

3. More on exercise.

(Exercise, particularly regularly done vigorous exercise is like a heart protection treatment. It removes much of the small particle LDL that causes heart disease by sticking into the chinks in your artery walls and changes what is left into the larger particles that roll along instead like tumbleweeds. You can see this on the tests since your HDL will go up or your triglycerides will go down –or both! This ratio shows how much of the dangerous LDL you have so you want high HDL and very low triglycerides. Exercise really helps!

The good news about the exercise is that although it can be even better for you to also get in several miles of walking each week or do Tai Chi in addition, the vigorous exercise session can be as short as 6 to 10 minutes a day and can be done at home.)

(My Friday session is 5 minutes of 4 very vigorous abdominal exercise and one minute of taking the kink out of my lower back though I rarely need it --while I do 35 minutes of strength training and 10 minutes on my Nordic Track on Saturday morning when I have more time.)

But even two minutes has some very positive effects.

And by doing them every week, it directly protects your heart each week AND the longer you have been doing them, the better your protection gets it was recently discovered!

So, try to do a session each day or 5 to 7 days a week even if it is just minutes long.

(This is easier and more reliable when you can do them first thing in the morning since the demands of the day that can prevent you haven’t showed up yet usually.)

Lastly, begin with easy and short sessions. Start each exercise just a bit slow and gradually boost up to what to you feels quite vigorous and then slow down or rest. The alternating of this kind in doing sets of strength training and in interval cardio makes short sessions effective at making you fit and creating health benefits. It does so MORE than long sessions of challenging but never varying cardio or aerobic exercise AND it is dramatically safer to do! (Also, for safety and to avoid injury increase how hard you work and how much you do very gradually. And only do it that way. The good news is you can build up to a level few people can do by just keeping at it even doing it that gradually.)

4. Do NOT eat hydrogenated fats or oils. These oils and for most of them the artificial trans fats they contain are heart attack starters. They do the reverse of exercise by INCREASING the bad LDL. They directly cause heart disease. Zero is the safe amount to ingest!

No shortening or pie crusts made with it is a heart protective practice. (In strict moderation real butter is actually far safer. And using extra virgin olive oil when it can be used is best.)

ALWAYS read labels.:

If the trans fat listing is any number besides zero, do not buy or eat that food. (The ingredients don’t always show where the trans fats came from.)

And, if the ingredients list has ANY listing for a hydrogenated oil do not buy or eat that food. (Zero transfats is not actually 0.0000 but up to 0.499 grams per serving instead and if you eat four of the too tiny servings to be a normal serving, you get quite a bit of trans fat.)

Most commercial snacks and baked goods and microwave popcorn still contain this stuff. Many fast food fried foods do. And, some breads, ice creams, candy bars, and peanut butters do as well.

5. New information: Both regular soft drinks and diet soft drinks and foods made with high fructose corn syrup have very similar effects to trans fats. Because they lower HDL -- and increase triglycerides a lot, that is solid proof of this.

So, too do foods made with refined grains and even real sugar if eaten in excess. A few times A MONTH is moderation. Several times each and every day harms your heart. And, most Americans have several times a day now.

These foods also cause obesity. If you stop eating and drinking all the worst ones -- and, make close to all your grain foods 100 % whole grains -- and eat real treat foods a few times a MONTH, and eat real foods instead, you may lose over half your excess fat with no other changes or added hunger.

Plus, your heart will stay far healthier; and your HDL, LDL, and triglyceride readings will improve dramatically.

6. New information:

The “natural” diet we evolved to eat and many of the best traditional cuisine deliver a one to one ratio of omega 3 oils.

But most people today get half or less of the omega 3 oils they need and close to 10 times too much omega 6.

This causes the chronic inflammation measured by the HS CRP test that is a powerful cause of heart disease equal to or greater than having too much of the bad LDL cholesterol. And, it makes you more likely to get most cancers.

Why? Most eat or use in cooking the oils high in omega 6 such as corn oil, soy oil, safflower oil or canola oil; AND they eat the fat from animals fed grains – mostly corn which is very high in omega 6 oils.

Eating less meat each month and eating only the leanest most fat trimmed versions IS protective for you in lowering your heart attack risk. But the fact that this cuts back on the omega 6 oils may be more important for heart protection than the saturated fat you also cut back by doing this.

Eating beans and lentils adds no omega 6 to speak of and is inexpensive and cuts down on your overall LDL level and tends to help keep off excess body fat.

And extra virgin olive oil is neutral as it is mostly monosaturated omega 9 oils and is the best oil to use by far for this reason. It also increases your protective HDL.

Meat from animals fed ONLY grass is also dramatically less harmful for your health than grain fed. This is also true of butter and full fat cheeses. This kind of real grass fed beef and butter and cheese is gradually becoming available. It costs more. But then by eating so much less of the bad stuff and eating more beans, your net costs may stay the same!

Lastly, eat wild caught fish that are high in omega 3 oils two or three times a week and take a daily omega 3 supplement from purified fish oil or from the algae the fish get it from.

(Tuna often has too much mercury to be safe more than once a month or less but wild caught salmon, herring, and sardines work and have dramatically less mercury.

Farmed fish are fed grains which destroys most of this protective effect. They also test as being one of the most multi-polluted foods on earth. Do NOT eat them.)

6. New information:

Unfortunately, taking calcium supplements just about doubles your risk of cardiovascular disease and fatal heart attacks.

The fast acting and concentrated supplements wind up in your blood as excess calcium and result in whatever artery plaque you have becoming calcified.

How calcified the plaque in your arteries are is a much more accurate indicator of heart attack risk than almost any combination of every thing else!

(Fifty to 100 mg of calcium in your daily multi is likely safe. But more than that is not. And taking 500 mg or more of calcium in supplements is now known to be quite dangerous.)

The good news is that eating foods high in calcium that deliver it gradually do NOT have this problem.

Even better, calcium in foods also tends to appear with the nonradioactive form of strontium which is more important in bone strength and density than calcium.

To keep your bones strong, eat a variety of foods high in calcium. (Most people tend to actually get enough from their foods of this particular nutrient by doing this.)

Nonfat and lowfat dairy foods work. Some full fat cheese from grass fed cows works. Canned and cooked wild caught salmon works and all canned, cooked sardines and herring are wild caught. And these cooked fish include the softened up bones with its calcium. So that works. Nuts, particularly, almonds, are high in calcium. And, broccoli and many kinds of greens and most beans and lentils have some calcium.

And taking at least 2,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 has been found to boost the amount of the calcium you eat that strengthens your bones. And the effect is LARGE. The calcium you eat is over five times as effective by doing this.

The same is true of getting “weight bearing” exercise daily. That can be as simple as doing housework while you stand or going on walks a few times a week. But doing strength training exercises that use your leg muscles to exert force or doing interval cardio while you stand up is even more effective.

Lastly, never drinking soft drinks removes one of the worst causes of bone thinning. And taking boron supplements and a daily vitamin K2 supplement have been found to help your body keep your bones strong. A small daily boron supplement also increase alertness and vitamin K2 also helps your body NOT put calcium in your arteries.

7. Too little known information:

The most accurate tests of exactly how your body and your genes handles the factors of heart attack risks were developed at Stanford and are now sold by the Berkeley Heart Lab.

When I looked at their website last, ALL these subtypes but one got more and better protection from taking the vitamin niacin than did from taking statin drugs.

(Niacinamide does some of the things for you that niacin does. But it does NOT have the heart protective effects.)

This is quite important to know. Statins have many side effects, quite serious ones in some people, and provide very little protection particularly for people who don’t do everything in the list above. They do lower total LDL and also lower CRP inflammation. But so does following the steps to cutting omega 6 and boosting omega 3 which is more effective and MUCH safer.

Niacin, by contrast, has been shown to cut the death rate from all causes. It increases HDL, lowers LDL, and lowers triglycerides. Taking it is one of the most heart protective things you can do besides doing all the lifestyle upgrades above.

If you take over 1,000 mg a day the flush effect can be a bit much and in can strain your liver so doing that is best under a doctors supervision who has you get your liver function tested every few months.

But, taking just 300 mg of niacin twice daily seems safe – once each after two of your meals each day -- & is quite effective and produces only an occasional and short flush reaction.

Further, taking inositol hexaniacinate of 300 mg a day twice a day delivers the niacin in it slowly as if it was a natural time release system. So unless you take with a quart of beer or something, it never produces any flush so it’s often labeled as no flush niacin. And you get the effect of about 250 mg of niacin from each 300 mg supplement.

Lastly, if your LDL is still 130 or more, taking sterol supplements will help lower it. And, mostly because sterols are in nuts and vegetables, taking them is very safe. Natrol makes a beta sitosterol, sterol supplement that is quite inexpensive. I take 3 a day.

And, adding this sterol supplement is one of the things I used to drop my LDL reading from 130 to 73.

My suggestion if your doctor wants you to take statins is to have him or her look at the Berkeley Heart Lab information.

Then ask if he or she thinks it worth having you get the $700 test to see if by chance you are in the group most benefitted by statins.

The good news is that you can get more improvement in your LDL readings and far more heart protection and do it much more safely than you can by taking statins. Just do all or most of the things on this list to the best of your ability.