Heart protection triple good news....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 3-18-2014

1.  Garlic has tested to be dramatically more heart protective than once thought.  And, the even better news is that the odor free aged garlic supplement tested to deliver them!  So, if you want to avoid garlic breath and get garlic’s heart protection, it IS doable.

2.  If you or someone you know has very risky heart health indicators, there IS a fast way to improve them that does not need drugs.

3.  Getting pneumonia can cause damage that makes heart disease more likely.  But there are now two ways to make that dramatically less likely.

Each of those is in this post:

1.  Garlic has tested to be dramatically more heart protective than once thought.  And, the even better news is that the odor free aged garlic supplement tested to deliver them!  So, if you want to avoid garlic breath and get garlic’s heart protection, it IS doable.

Initially garlic was thought to not be that protective.  But that was back in the day when the only measure was LDL and total cholesterol.  Garlic didn’t lower those much.

Since then it has tested to increase the pliability and responsiveness of your blood vessels which is heart protective.  And, it was found to increase HDL.  Even better, a study found that enough garlic plus well over 500 mg a day of vitamin C helped REDUCE plaque inside blood vessels while the group not getting those got increased plaque instead as is typical.

But the most effective form of garlic is freshly minced garlic cloves in a salad or other dish that is not heated and is eaten immediately.

With the right other ingredients this can be delicious.  But it’s not always convenient and there is clean up needed in the kitchen if you do it at home.  Worse, you get garlic breath big time.  So you may only want to do this for dinner some days a week normally.

I’ve taken the deodorized garlic supplements for years in hopes they had some of these effects; but I was never really sure they did as much as I would like. 

The good news is that tests have now found out that the deodorized garlic supplements DO deliver that much protection:

It DOES slow the deposit of plaques inside your blood vessels and DOES make excess clotting far less likely. Because it lowers triglycerides it may cut the plaque deposits in part by lowering small particle LDL!

In addition, it sounds like it lowers HBA1C!! 

(Since high HBA1C is what makes your LDL cholesterol have spikes of sugar crystals and harm your blood vessels causing heart disease, that is heart protective too.)

And, higher doses during cold and flu season may help cut average sick days in companies!

In addition to its lowering HBA1C & blood flow problems it may also lower inflammation and by doing all 3 it also helps prevent Alzheimer's disease.

It helps prevent colon cancer and may have already protected me from it!

Here’s the story that I think I saw in my Newsmax email.

Garlic: Ancient Cure Backed by Science   Tuesday, 28 Jan 2014 03:31 PM   By Vera Tweed

For more than 4,000 years, garlic has been used as medicine. Athletes at the first Olympics in ancient Greece ate it to enhance performance, and both Greek and Roman soldiers believed it boosted strength and courage. More recently, scientists have been finding that the odiferous bulb can keep us in good health, and more than 3,800 scientific articles have been published about garlic since 1945.

Eating one or two cloves each day is one option, but it may not appeal to your taste buds – or to those within smelling distance.

Odorless Alternative

Supplements are a simple alternative. One particular type of supplement — aged garlic extract — has been studied more than any other. Made from organically grown garlic and aged without the use of heat, it’s odorless and proven to help the heart, improve resistance to colds, reduce damage to blood vessels from elevated blood sugar or diabetes, and reduce risk for colorectal cancers and Alzheimer’s disease.

Heart Help

Studies have shown that aged garlic extract lowers blood pressure, cholesterol, and triglycerides. But its greatest benefit may be reducing arterial plaque, also called calcification of arteries, which many integrative physicians believe to be the most reliable predictor of ill health and death from heart disease.

Dr. Matthew Budoff, a cardiologist, researcher, and associate professor of medicine at the UCLA School of Medicine, is an expert in scanning technology that measures plaque in arteries. In a study published in the Journal of Nutrition, he examined the effects of aged garlic extract on people with heart disease who were taking statins.

“I found that the amount of calcification in the arteries of a person with elevated cholesterol can increase by 40 percent in one year,” he says. “Yet, when my team and I gave patients 1,200 mg of aged garlic extract a day, they slowed the growth of their plaque by 66 percent in one year.”

There were no adverse interactions between the statin medications and the garlic supplement. However, statins taken alone without garlic supplementation did not stop growth of arterial plaque.

Other research shows these benefits:

Reducing colds and flu: In a study at the University of Florida, compared to a placebo, people who took 2,500 mg of aged garlic extract daily for 90 days suffered 61 percent fewer days with a cold or flu. Tests showed that the supplement boosted resistance by making immune cells work more efficiently.

 Preventing Alzheimer’s disease: Researchers at several leading universities, including Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, have concluded that aged garlic extract counteracts development of Alzheimer’s disease by improving circulation, reducing inflammation, and helping to prevent the formation of brain plaques.

Protecting against colorectal cancers: Animal and human studies show that eating garlic or taking aged garlic extract reduces risk for colon and rectal cancers, and the supplement may help to reduce colon cancer progression.

Helping diabetics: Elevated blood sugar, with or without diabetes, produces harmful substances known as advanced glycation endproducts, a combination of protein and sugar molecules that damages blood vessels and, among diabetics, leads to complications. Aged garlic extract inhibits the formation of these substances. “I think aged garlic extract should be right alongside your multivitamins every day. It’s that important,” says Dr. Budoff. “It could save your life.”

A widely recommended dosage is 1,200 mg a day. Many experts believe it is best to take garlic in two or three doses with meals spread out through the day.

Aged Garlic Benefits in Clinical Studies

Studies have shown that aged garlic supplements improve crucial markers for good health. Below are some of the benefits found by researchers in recent years.

Health Marker

Improvement

• Platelets sticking to artery walls

34-58 percent

• Platelet clumping

10-25 percent

• Triglycerides

10-19 percent

So, the aged garlic supplements DO protect you from heart disease.

2.  If you or someone you know has very risky heart health indicators, there IS a fast way to improve them that does not need drugs.

There are 3 measures that doctors look at to assess heart disease risk.

The initial guidelines were LDL cholesterol over 160 was risky and WAY over 160 as in 200 or 300 + was very high risk.  Desirable is 100 or below with below 80 a bit better.

This is accurate.  BUT more recent research has found is it far LESS important than your triglycerides and HDL and the ratio between them.

The ratio between HDL and triglycerides Harvard researchers found is an accurate measure of how many small particles of LDL is in your blood.  And, since a high number of those is just about the most important direct cause of heart disease, that means that low HDL and high triglycerides is a MUCH more important measure than just total LDL.

But what if you or someone you care about has HDL below 50 or even below 40 and worse, triglycerides of 200 or 300 or more?

How do you make real improvements fast to slash the risk quickly?

Statins won’t do it because they are not well targeted to do so and not that protective anyway.

What improvements they deliver are not fast either.

What will work?

These two steps will.  First, turn off the flame throwers causing the fire.  Turning them down a bit is too little and may be too late.

High triglerides are cause by ingesting high fructose corn syrup, excess sugars, refined grains, and more whole grains than zero to very low.

The readings reflect the amount of small particle LDL.  ANY intake of hydrogenated oils and trans fats DIRECTLY increase these particles.  That shows up when your HDL falls and your trigylerides go up. 

Cutting back on these is useless.  If you keep eating them regularly because your body can’t get rid of them at all quickly and a small regular intake builds up to a lot in your body.

You may not think of these things as heart attack starters let alone VERY effective ones.  But they are.  If you do totally stop them and eat real health supporting foods instead, your triglycerides will fall quickly and your HDL will gradually increase.

Second, Dr Al Sears had a patient who had high triglycerides and low HDL who he had take the omega 3 oil DHA and Krill oil which is not that high in omega 3 but boosts the ability of your body to take up DHA if you also take it -- with this result, his patient was :

“surprised by the sudden changes to his HDL and triglyceride levels. I haven’t seen changes this far-reaching—or this FAST—with ANY other therapy I’ve used in my practice.”

So if you take both steps, you can slash your heart attack risk and the biomarkers for it within days or weeks at most.

If you keep doing it and add exercise which directly reduces the number of small particles of LDL too, after a few years you can have HDL that is HIGHER than your triglycerides.

As a young man, I had HDL of about 50 and triglycerides of 150.  Not good but not too bad either. 

Now I eat far better – much less sugar and even less grains -- and have done regular exercise for longer and take DHA, I’m at 100 HDL and 37 for triglycerides.

So over time you can get an even bigger effect.  But it’s nice to know you can bring down really high risk readings quickly too.

3.  Getting pneumonia can cause damage that makes heart disease more likely.  But there are now two ways to make that dramatically less likely.

You may have seen our previous posts with this:

a) IF you take 3,000 to 5,000 iu a day of vitamin D3, you are far less likely to get pneumonia or to be harmed by flu or pneumonia:

People who die or are severely harmed from flu or pneumonia have been tested to be severely deficient in vitamin D3.

Conversely, if take 3,000 to 5,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 you get these protections.

You are less likely to get a case of flu that could develop pneumonia as a complication or have it be that bad if you get it.

If you take that much D3 and get the flu shot, it’s MUCH more likely to protect you from getting the flu.

And, if you take that much D3 and get the pneumonia vaccine, it’s also more likely to protect you and the harm you will sustain if you get pneumonia will be far less.

b) The other good news is that you now have access to the new pneumonia vaccine that is nearly twice as likely to prevent pneumonia than the original one:

  "Prevnar 13® is a vaccine approved for adults 50 years of age and older" 

There is also a 23 version.

I saved the news article I saw that announced that it is now available to more people but mislabeled it or lost it.

But if you have had the older version, the story I saw had that the new version was also available to adults now.