Advanced heart attack prevention....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 3-29-2016

The essentials are to keep your blood vessels wide open, healthy, and responsive AND to avoid things that cause them to be sticky or your blood to clot too easily.

The opposite is when you create conditions that cause damage of the surface of your arteries that your body patches a bit too much and adds calcium to the patch or makes the patch soft enough it breaks off in a chunk.

If this over-patching goes on too long so the blood vessel becomes almost blocked or stiff or both AND you do something that triggers a clot or some of the softer patching, aka plaque, to break off and block the remaining opening, you have a heart attack or ischemic (obstructive stroke.)

After this overview we list some new information on how to make your blood vessels so hard to put excessive patches on, it almost never happens!

1.  Quick overview of the things we know to prevent this:

Eating as close as you can to 6 or more servings of organic vegetables AND at least one serving of an organic fruit a day provides the natural vitamin C & phytonutrients that prevent damage in the walls of your arteries.  (This is not only one of the most effective ways to prevent heart attacks and both kinds of stroke, it cuts your risk of death from any cause too!)

Eating an inflammation preventing set of foods that include wild caught fish and extra virgin olive oil and no wheat or grain oils such as soy and corn oil AND eating no protein foods from factory-farmed fed animals fed grains AND taking DHA and curcumin and ginger prevents the inside of your blood vessels from getting the inflammation that causes patching and avoids excessive patching.

Not eating any wheat and few grains and zero sources of free high fructose and zero artificial sweetners and a low to very low amount of real sugar AND eating zero hydrogenated vegetable oils plus taking DHA and omega 3 oils and eating wild caught fish has been found to very sharply reduce triglycerides and increase HDL to high levels. 

Researchers at Harvard found this indicates that the small particle LDL that sticks into your blood vessel walls and triggers excess patching and plaque buildup stops happening because there is so little of it.

People who build up to doing vigorous exercise most days of every week directly reduce their levels of small particle LDL.  Even better, the more years in a row they do this, the greater the effect becomes!  (And, the exercise also causes longer telomeres, more mitochondria, and slows aging by doing so -- which ALSO is heart attack preventive.)

(People who drink soft drinks and eat wheat and packaged snacks and desserts and high fructose corn syrup and get no exercise have the REVERSE, sky high triglycerides and very low HDL.  That means they have a high level of small particle LDL and excess damage to their arteries and excess patching.

In people who smoke or are exposed to second hand smoke, this also happens or happens even more.  So every exposure builds up plaque and brings heart attacks and strokes nearer.)

Worse, if this plaque gets calcium added to it, your arteries become harder, easier to block and less responsive -- and you get high blood pressure.  We now know that getting enough vitamin K2 ensures the calcium you eat goes into building your bones AND removes it from your blood vessels.

2.   Wouldn’t it be great to make your blood vessels even clearer and harder to cover with excess and unneeded plaque?

Of course.

And, we now know several ways to do that besides the ones we just listed!

These particularly build on getting enough vitamin C and organic fruits and vegetables and their phyto chemicals that make your blood vessel walls strong, healthy, and pliable.

a) We posted on the findings that taking deodorized garlic prevents plaque buildup AND protects against the buildup of the soft plaque that can break away to cause large clots or blockages.

In taking deodorized garlic myself, I found that my high HDL stayed high but my triglycerides dropped a lot more.  That means that my number of small particle LDL that tend to cause plaque buildup dropped significantly!

In fact, other research found that taking the garlic plus enough vitamin C, 1000 to 3,000 mg a day, tended to REDUCE plaque.

b)  There is a measure called Lp(a) that apparently measures how sticky the insides of your blood vessels are.  If it’s high, it is predictive of increased heart attack risk.

But if it’s low, it becomes like the oil in an engine, it keeps things free flowing.

Aha!

But we know 3 ways MORE beyond these basics to lower your Lp(a) into that low range!

*Linus Pauling found that adding the amino acids proline and lysine together to enough vitamin C did that!  (If you want to do that, 500 mg capsules of lysine are easy to find.  Whole Foods has lysine as a house brand in 500 mg capsules.  But to get proline, you have to know to buy or order the 500 mg capsules of proline from NOW supplements.)

**Secondly, taking niacin does incredibly heart protective things.  Because it increases HDL and lowers triglycerides and LDL, we know it lowers the level of your small particle LDL!

But it turns out it ALSO lowers Lp(a) too!

(Niacin can produce a flush reaction which I think of as experiencing burning away heart attack risk.  But if it gets too much it’s like getting an instant if temporary sunburn.  You turn red and feel too hot.

There are several ways to get its effect without overdoing this flush or getting it at all.

You can take a 300 mg tablet of niacin from Whole Foods after your two largest meals.

(Some people are more sensitive to it and need to take a half tablet after their largest meal only.)

But you can get 500 mg of niacin with no flush at all by taking two 300 mg capsules of insositol hexaniacinate.  As your body gradually separates that into the 250 mg of niacin in the capsule and the B vitamin insositol, you get such a slow exposure to the niacin there is no flush.

My wife and I take two a day of those.

***I just found out there is yet a third way to lower high Lp(a)!

AND, like the other two methods, it has extra protective benefits.

Taking 500 mg or 1,000 mg a day of NAC, n-acetyl-cysteine, has been shown to lower Lp(a)!

But taking that much also releases the unusually potent antioxidant glutathione.

That means that both your HDL and LDL are less likely to become oxidized.  And, it’s their oxidized form that causes heart disease.

Even better, the glutathione lengthens your telomeres and slows aging too!

(Jarrow sells a 500 mg capsule of NAC.)

By the way, the only way most doctors know how to treat high Lp(a) is with niacin; and they usually don’t know how to use it without causing dreadful flushing.

I’ve not been able to test it yet.  But I suspect using the three methods together we just listed with the minimal flushing from niacin is just as effective and MUCH easier to tolerate doing!