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

Today's Post: Friday, 2-18-2011

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.

Yesterday and today together are the information 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 are two more ways to protect your heart that I didn't have time to post yesterday. Here they are.

(And, there are many more.) But these two are relatively major ways I wanted to add today.

1. Excessively high blood sugar levels have the effect of damaging your capillaries.

(Type 1 diabetes has this effect but is not as easily effected or affected the same way by the things that work well for people who have high blood sugar from insulin resistance.)

But, people who have blood sugar levels above the desirable level even if it hasn't gotten so bad as to become type 2 diabetes or type 2 diabetes itself can turn down the high blood sugar and prevent this effect by doing many of the things that are in our original post.

For heart protection, it's important to know your blood sugar level. If your fasting blood sugar is 100 or more, you will be better off in every way if you lower it below 100 and keep it there.

The capillary damage from high blood sugar doubles the heart disease risk in men and increases it by FOUR times in women. (It also can blind you, cut off circulation to your feet, and ruin your kidneys! Ouch!)

The good news is that by doing the vigorous exercise and NOT drinking soft drinks or eating sweet foods a lot or eating foods made from refined grains that are in the main post, you can and will lower your blood sugar levels.

You get multiple protection from doing those things.

But you can also lower blood sugar a bit with two supplements. (Others may work also. But these two definitely do and have other health benefits. So I recommend them highly. They were the two I added when I moved my own fasting glucose from 115 to 87 besides removing some sugar from my food.)

Chromium polynicotinate also increases your HDL and it gives your body a key nutrient it needs to keep your blood sugar low. Solgar sells it and that makes it easily available in most health food stores. 200 to 400 mcg a day is the amount that seems to work.

Alpha lipoic acid also helps your body lower high blood sugar. I only added 200 mg once a day. But you can also take as much as 600 mg three times a day as some studies found that to be effective.

2. The second major method to protect you from heart disease that I left our yesterday is to eat foods high in antioxidants and to take supplements that are antioxidants.

It seems that the LDL that is most effective at causing heart disease is oxidized LDL, so if in addition to having less LDL and much less of the small particle and most dangerous kind, you prevent your LDL from oxidizing.

Even better, you help your body stand up to the exercise you do without having it increase your level of inflammation or cause extra damage. So this step also makes exercise safer to do.

Foods high in antioxidants due to having certain micronutrients and vitamin A from animal sources and from plant sources, vitamin C, the vitamin E complex, and selenium but not too much all have this effect.

Blueberries and virtually all other berries are high in antioxidants of many kinds AND vitamin C.

And, there are many other fruits and vegetables high in vitamin C.

You can also take between 1000 and a bit over 2,000 mg a day of vitamin C. This not only is a good antioxidant but has been found to deliver some key heart protecting benefits in addition.

Eggs, wild caught fish, liver from grass fed cattle, and fortified lowfat milk have the animal form of vitamin A but not too much except for overdoing on Cod liver oil.

Any yellow or orange vegetable and many dark green ones where the green hides the yellow or orange colors are high in beta carotene and alpha carotene and many other kinds of carotene. These varieties of vitamin A besides being great antioxidants strongly prevent cancer AND were recently found to cut people's death rate from and every cause!

Carrots, broccoli, chard, collard greens, kale, squash, pumpkin puree, sweet potatoes and yams, and tomatoes both raw and cooked all are foods high in carotenes. Eating a variety of these vegetables with extra virgin olive oil, makes their carotenes more bioavailable. You can also take beta carotene in your multi. And you can take lycopene from tomatoes as a supplement too. But you get better health effects by eating a variety of these vegetables beyond that instead of adding more supplements. The vegetables have more antioxidants and more kinds of carotenes than the supplements do.

Garlic either just crushed or minced in a salad or as a deodorized garlic supplement has directly been proven to lower the oxidation of your LDL cholesterol and also works. (It also decreases excess clotting and makes your blood vessels more flexible and responsive.) So it is quite heart protective. (You can take the supplements any time. But eating the fresh version is best done for dinner because of the garlic breath you otherwise get in public if you eat it at breakfast or lunch.)

Many spices are quite high in antioxidants. In fact, so is coffee, tea, and green tea.

Lastly, you can eat nuts and avocados if you aren't allegic and eat extra virgin olive oil. These foods are OK for your heart as they increase your LDL AND they have the entire set of the vitamin E complex in their natural forms. This is a much better antioxidant than just taking vitamin E as alphatocoherol only -- though you can take that too.

Lastly, if you do that set of things AND take alpha lipoic acid, the alpha lipoic acid somehow recharges your antioxidants and multiplies how effective they are.