News in heart disease prevention....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 6-12-2012

There are several parts of heart disease. 

So the good news is that there is a lot that can be done to prevent it because there are many ways to prevent each of the parts.

The bad news is that you have to do most of these things to get decent heart disease prevention.

There are apparently four parts of heart disease:

1.  Too much damage to the endothelium or inner surface of your blood vessel walls, particularly in the arteries leading to your heart.  But that damage in blood vessels to and inside your brain and your kidneys also can cause you serious harm or kill you.

The key is too much damage.  If you do the things that prevent it, the second part no longer happens and most heart disease no longer happens.

2.  The next key part is too much repair.  Your body sends in extra lipids and proteins and, according to new data, stem cells, to do repairs and the result is like putting band-aids on top of band-aids if too much is done. Plaque builds up when that it is done. That results in narrower blood vessels with less room for blood or blood clots to pass through. That results in less circulation to the parts of you that blood vessel serves.  Worse, if there is a blood clot, it may stopper up the blood vessel and no blood flows at all.  Then you have a heart attack or obstructive stroke.  That often kills or causes severe damage.

3.  This plaque build up becomes much worse if the plaque is also calcified.  This prevents your body from gradually removing some of the plaque and makes your blood vessel less flexible.  That causes high blood pressure which can damage you and it makes it more likely clots passing through will stick.  Clots that would have been pushed through a more flexible blood vessel even if narrowed, will now stick.  Bad news indeed!

4.  If new plaque is added so quickly that it breaks off before it’s fully stuck on or when the patch won’t stick since so much is already in place or some of the repair breaks off an old repair, you can cause a blockage in the narrowed blood vessels.  Or if your blood develops too much clotting factors or no longer has enough anti-clotting factors, you can get a traveling blood clot too big to pass through the narrowed blood vessels. 

1.  Most of the causes of too much damage to your blood vessel walls are known.  Those few people who know them and see to it that they stop happening to them get good to excellent protection from heart disease.

a) Avoid excessive levels of the dangerous small particle LDL.

People who get regular and vigorous exercise have lower LDL cholesterol and usually have higher HDL and very often have lower triglycerides.  These are markers that they have less small particle LDL.  Those particles are so small they literally stick into chinks in the blood vessel walls.  That both causes damage and tends to make repairs build up and stick on more than is desirable.

There is some evidence that taking niacin also reduces the amount of this dangerous small particle LDL.  So people who take niacin not only have lower LDL & triglycerides and higher HDL, it’s because of this underlying effect.

But perhaps over half of heart attack prevention is to STOP doing or NOT doing things that cause more of this dangerous small particle LDL.

Most Americans are at very high risk because they don’t know to stop or don’t do it if they know.

Ingesting any hydrogenated oils or the related trans fats boosts this dangerous small particle LDL.

Drinking soft drinks both regular and diet boosts this dangerous small particle LDL.

Eating high fructose corn syrup or refined grain foods or excessive amounts of sugar also boosts this boosts this dangerous small particle LDL.

This can be seen by the low HDL levels and very high triglyceride levels of people who eat and drink this stuff.  Work at Harvard found that this combination is a reliable indicator of the level of this boosts this dangerous small particle LDL.

(Note that boosting HDL in isolation without reducing the amount of boosts this dangerous small particle LDL is like putting a heater next to a thermostat and thinking the whole room is warmer because the indicator of temperature goes up.  If the HDL goes up because there is less of this dangerous small particle LDL, it’s protective.  If it goes up with no change in the dangerous small particle LDL, it may do very little as recent drug efforts have found.)

Smoking tobacco and being exposed to second hand smoke sharply increase the amount of this dangerous small particle LDL it also causes the irritation and inflammation that cause and speed up excess damage and repair.  Ways of looking at plaque build up in the blood vessels reliably show smokers and those exposed to second hand smoke have more plaque build up by far than people not exposed to second hand smoke.

Bottom line, if you eat right and exercise and avoid tobacco smoke, you have good heart attack protection.  If you also take niacin and take sterol supplements if your overall LDL is much over 100, you will have excellent heart attack protection. 

(The DASH II diet with some extra virgin olive oil and wild caught fish or the Mediterranean diet with a bit less pasta and more vegetables are two similar and doable ways to eat right.)

b)  Chronic inflammation tends to damage your  blood vessel walls AND makes over repair much more likely.

Omega 3 supplements and eating wild caught fish containing omega 3 oils turns down chronic inflammation.

Each of these cause excessive amounts of omega 6 oils which causes or boosts chronic inflammation.: 

Eating more than a moderate amount of 100% whole grains or eating a lot of refined grain foods and consuming a lot of cheap vegetable oils high in omega 6 such as corn and soy.

(Using extra virgin olive oil instead and eating mostly beans and lentils and vegetables and health OK protein foods instead helps prevent this.)

Eating more than a tiny amount of fats from animals fed mostly on grain.  Eating lots of fatty meat from animals fed grain may well cause far more heart disease from this omega 6 boost than it does from excess saturated fat!  (The excess saturated fat tends to boost total LDL cholesterol; but some saturated fat from small amounts of meat from animals NOT fed grain and fed grass and their normal diet may be relatively harmless.)

The DASH II diet does this by stressing nonfat and lowfat dairy and skinless poultry and a smaller amount of very lean and fat trimmed meat.  The Mediterranean diet does this by having far less dairy and more wild caught fish and vegetables.

c)  Blood vessel damage also comes from excess sugar stuck onto even large particle LDL which is like treating your blood vessel walls with moving particles of glass!  Yikes!

The better news is that the 3 things we just covered largely prevent this from happening.

Regular and vigorous exercise and NOT eating refined grains and sugar foods or drinking soft drinks tend to prevent the spikes in blood sugar and insulin and your body beginning to stop using insulin that cause this high blood sugar effect.

Eating the health OK proteins and oils and vegetables and low glycemic fruits tend to give you the kind of steady blood sugar and low insulin that prevents this high blood sugar damage to your blood vessels.

You can also take chromium polynicotinate and alpha lipoic acid to prevent high blood sugar. 

If it gets high or is high because you are just upgrading to a healthy lifestyle, smaller and divided doses of the drug Metformin with meals can also help.

d)  Blood vessel damage also comes from oxidized lipids.  But that’s already mostly covered.  If you eat a lot of vegetables almost every day and some high nutrition, low glycemic fruit such as berries you have a high intake of antioxidants.  That’s also true for the vitamin E complex if you eat extra virgin olive oil an avocado and nuts if you aren’t allergic.

Taking some vitamin A and lots of vitamin C and some natural vitamin E and a small amount of selenium, 200 mcg a day also has antioxidant effects.

e)  Both Linus Pauling and Dr Matthias Rath have said that failure to have a high intake of vitamin C also causes blood vessel damage.  Animals that make their own vitamin C don’t get excessive blood vessel damage or repairs and avoid heart disease.  Taking at least 500 mg a day of vitamin C, and 2,000 mg a day in divided doses may work better may well prevent much of the excess damage and repair that causes heart disease. 

There is also some evidence that once you take that much vitamin C, also taking 1,000 mg of lysine and 500 mg of proline will cut your blood vessel damage even more by building up the strength and resilience of your blood vessel walls.

2.  Too much repair.

Many of the actions that prevent excess damage also directly prevent excess repair.  This is particularly true of avoiding things that boost chronic inflammation because when your inflammation level is high it signals your repair process to stay on high also.

That means that everything to avoid excess omega 6 and add healthy forms of omega 3 does double duty to prevent heart disease.

Another bit of recent news is that the “omentum” that lines your abdomen is the source of the stem cells used in blood vessel repairs.  Besides a bad life style causing obesity, this may also mean that having too much fat in your gut and too much omentum also tends to cause too much repair.  That may be another reason to add some fat loss to healthy lifestyle upgrades.  It likely tends to stop overdriving your blood vessel repairs.

Lastly, using ginger and turmeric as spices often not only improves your immune system and lowers LDL cholesterol a bit they both turn down excessive inflammation.  So does taking curcumin from turmeric as a supplement.

3.  Too much clotting.

Having a good omega 6 to omega 3 ratio by stopping excess omega 6 and taking omega 3 supplements and eating wild caught fish high in omega 3 also cuts down on excess clotting. 

So does eating crushed fresh garlic or taking deodorized garlic as a supplement. 

And so does the vitamin E complex in extra virgin olive oil and avocados and nuts and taking a natural vitamin E supplement.  (The synthetic vitamin E is an inaccurate copy and harmful to take much of.)

So does taking the supplement ginkgo biloba.

(So does taking aspirin but with dangerous side effects.  If you do the other things, aspirin and other blood thinners are usually not needed unless your clotting factors start out enormously high.)

4.  Calcifying the plaque.

New research has found that eating foods high in calcium and taking 2,000 or more iu of vitamin D3 and taking magnesium and never drinking soft drinks and getting weight bearing exercise keeps your bones strong.

Taking calcium as a supplement is ineffective as a bone protector and not needed if you do the other things just listed.

But new research has found worse effects from taking calcium as a supplement.  It tends to slam into your blood stream in a way that causes it to add to the calcification of your plaque in your blood vessels and make a heart attack more likely.

Then what if you could take something that moved calcium already in your body from your plaque in your blood vessels and use it to strengthen your bones instead?  What if it took new calcium from foods you ate and made sure it strengthened your bones and never went into the plaque in your blood vessels?

That agent exists.  It does those things.  And it’s available as a supplement.  It’s vitamin K2.  Most people don’t get enough. 

So if you want to protect your heart and have strong bones, take vitamin K2 every day.

And do NOT take calcium supplements, eat foods high in calcium and do the other things to protect and strengthen your bones instead!

So there you have all of the ways to prevent heart disease and how much of the recent news about heart disease fits into it—except one.

What about statin drugs? 

Millions of older people today take them.  But if you do the things listed here you’ll have better heart disease and heart attack prevention than they provide. 

For those in the majority of people, they do little for 100 people must take them to prevent one heart attack.

There is a different group of people with different genes who do benefit more.  So if your doctor has you take the genetic test that shows you are in that group and you have had a recent heart attack or have LDL cholesterol WAY over 160, statins may help.

But recent news came out verifying what I had long suspected about my parents.  They both were taking statins but began to complain of what they thought of as age cause losses in energy and stamina.  That does exist.   But I suspected the statins they took were causing most of it.

The news is that taking statins DOES cause this effect.  New research verified it.

Other studies show that taking statins often causes the same vigorous exercise you need for good heart protection to damage your muscles instead.

So, only take statins if you are in the group that have had the $150 genetic test and found you are in the group that benefits more and you have had a recent heart attack or have LDL cholesterol WAY over 160.

STOP eating things that cause heart disease, avoid tobacco smoke, eat the foods that prevent heart disease, build up gradually to regular vigorous exercise for at least a few minutes on most days, and take the key supplements and you CAN prevent or turn down heart disease.

Few people will need to add statins to that and most should not.