New way to protect your heart....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 5-7-2013

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New way to protect your heart....

High blood pressure, damage to your heart from heart attacks you survived, and lack of the ubiquinol form of CoQ10 caused by aging or taking statin drugs, each tend to cause congestive heart failure.

Congestive heart failure is truly dreadful stuff because as your heart gets weaker, you gradually become unable to move about and begin to drown in the fluid in your lungs.  It’s progressive and currently fatal.  And it’s hideously expensive to treat!

Preventing heart failure is worth some strong extra effort!

(I’ve seen this first hand.  My Dad basically died of it.)

1.  You can of course use lifestyle upgrades to a health supporting diet and add safe exercise every week to lower your blood pressure and protect you from its bad effects. 

A recent study found that for lower levels of high blood pressure this was more protective than taking drugs and that adding the drugs added no further protection.  (See the DASH II diet and the Mediterranean diet for what TO eat.)

2.  You can prevent heart attacks by adding low levels of niacin and taking sterol supplements besides those life style upgrades instead of taking statin drugs. 

The diet upgrades include completely stopping any hydrogenated oils and cutting back dramatically on foods made with sugar, refined grains or oils high in omega 6 and completely stopping foods made with high fructose corn syrup and stopping all soft drinks.  Research shows stopping these heart attack starters is one of the most heart protective things you can do. 

Completely avoiding tobacco smoke also belongs on this list.  Tobacco smoke causes blood vessel damage and heart disease in ALL smokers – no exceptions. And, tobacco smoke also triggers heart attacks in people who would have escaped them otherwise!

3.  You can also take the ubiquinol form of CoQ10 as a supplement to help make sure your heart has enough.

4.  This new study shows that there is yet another way to prevent heart failure!

You can make your heart dramatically less easy to harm and help it recover more easily.

In  The Better Brain Book: The Best Tool for Improving Memory and Sharpness and Preventing Aging of the Brain by David Perlmutter and Carol Colman (Aug 2, 2005),

he describes how the extremely powerful antioxidant glutathione is a key to keeping good health and protecting your brain.

He relates how he has saved very sick patients who had very low levels of glutathione by administering glutathione directly.

And he cites the studies showing that taking NAC, n-acetyl-cysteine, supplements causes strong glutathione release in the body such that people taking NAC give their brains very strong protection and slash the risk of mental decline.

This new study shows that eating grapes boosts glutathione in your heart.  And, having high levels of this very powerful antioxidant, they found, prevents heart failure.

Grape seed extract has been separately shown to help reduce endothelial dysfunction and cardiovascular disease and somewhat decrease the related high blood pressure.

But if boosting glutathione is the way these effects are produced, that's extremely useful news!

That's because the supplement NAC boosts glutathione quite strongly.

In addition, if someone has recently had a heart attack, their blood levels of glutathione can be measured.  And if their their blood levels of glutathione are low, it can be administered directly as a treatment.  This research suggests that doing so will reduce the lasting damage from the heart attack!

This may also be a reason that eating organic wild blueberries and taking bilberry extract are health and heart protective.

And, it may be another reason red wine in moderation is heart protective.

Using all these methods, you can make getting heart failure very unlikely in your case!

Adding this new method that helps prevent your heart from being damaged can be a huge help!

BIG added boost to heart protection also strengthens bones!

False headlines & the truth about vitamins and minerals, Vitamin K2....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 5-29-2012

Most doctors know little about supplements including vitamins and minerals and are too busy to find out more unless they somehow get updated by their patients or other doctors who know more. 

Some doctors have studied supplements and find they can get superior results with patients by using the indicated supplements.  Since the supplements cost less than drugs and have virtually no side effects that harm quality of life, far more of their patients actually take the supplements than take many drugs.

The drug companies don’t like the competition from those supplements that do work but have none of the side effects most of their drugs do and the supplements cost less.

 (Some drugs do important things and do them fast that supplements cannot do.  And, for some things the drugs are the better choice. Then too some supplements may not be that effective.

But the drug companies appear to be deliberately misinforming doctors and the media and thus many of the rest of us about supplements that do work.)

So you may have seen headlines like “Vitamins are a waste of money or dangerous” AND “Vitamin E causes Prostate Cancer.”

But the truth is far different.  Very different!

1.  Most vitamins and minerals are beneficial and some are spectacularly beneficial. 

There are a few vitamins and minerals that do have side effects in doses that are too large.  But if you know what level is safe on those few, those same vitamins and minerals can benefit you.

This makes the headline, “Vitamins are a waste of money or dangerous” false & I think deliberately misleading.

2.  We know 4 things about vitamin E and prostate cancer.  The headline as quoted, “Vitamin E causes Prostate Cancer" is completely false.  And the other 3 things help prevent prostate cancer!  (The study did not test real vitamin E but a poor artificial copy that was not real vitamin E!)

We covered vitamin E the first week in this series, on Tuesday, 3-13-2012.

We covered vitamin D3, on Tuesday, 3-20-2012.

We covered vitamin B3, niacin, on Tuesday, 3-27-2012.

We covered the other B complex vitamins last week on Tuesday, 4-3-2012.

We covered vitamin C on Thursday, 4-12

On Tuesday, 4-17, we covered vitamin A & carotenes and related compounds.

On Tuesday, 4-24, we covered calcium.

On Tuesday, 5-1, we covered chromium.

On Thursday, 5-10, we covered Selenium.

On Tuesday, 5-15, we covered Zinc & copper which interact

Last week, on Tuesday, 5-22, we covered magnesium.

This week we cover vitamin K2.              

Wow!  It adds massive extra protection for your heart and strengthens your bones too!

This is still not very well known.  I just learned it myself last Friday, 5-25-2012, from the email I got that day from Natural Health Dossier.

I’d heard that taking vitamin K2 could at least partly avoid the easy bruising and possible hemorrhages from overdoing ways to protect your heart that reduce too much blood clotting.

Too much clotting and plaque build up inside your blood vessels both narrows them and then closes them entirely if you get a big clot into your bloodstream causing a heart attack or obstructive or ischemic stroke. 

So doing things like drinking red wine and taking ginkgo biloba and taking deodorized garlic and omega 3 supplements and eating wild caught fish high in omega 3 plus other heart protective things such as avoiding trans fats that reduce plaque build up each help prevent these two things and protect you from heart disease and heart attack.

I do enough of these things to have HDL, LDL, & triglyceride readings showing unusually high heart protection.  But from doing so many or from taking niacin’s effect on my liver too, I began to get extra bruises on my left hand without any blows and I began to get bad bruises if I did hit my hand.

So, when I heard that taking vitamin K2 would both turn down such easy bruising and help my liver do so as well by boosting its health, I began taking vitamin K2.  And, it did help quite a bit!

It seems that was no accident.  Wikipedia has that "Vitamin K was identified in 1929 by Danish scientist Henrik Dam" who found that both vitamin K1 and vitamin K2 are essential to some degree to enable enough blood coagulation or clotting.  (Coagulation was & is spelled with a K in Danish apparently.)

From the broccoli I eat and the large amount of tea and green tea I drink, I was already getting plenty of K1.  So what I likely was short of was indeed vitamin K2.

So when I also heard that adding vitamin K2 to eating calcium in foods and taking ample magnesium and vitamin D3 plus strength training plus NEVER drinking soft drinks made that set of things build my bone strength even more, I was delighted.

It seems the K2 acts as a catalyst working with these other things to deposit calcium into your bones in a way that strengthens them.

Nice to know. 

In fact, since drugs for osteoporosis have such dreadful side effects and tend to do more harm than good protecting your bones, this is very important information to know!

But what the email last Friday from Natural Health Dossier added was truly HUGE news.

This is so much so it should have been a front page news article everywhere.

It wasn’t.  But here it is for you.

It seems that vitamin K2’s action of putting the calcium into your bones is only a quarter of the value and half the story!

Vitamin K2, in doing this for your bones, ALSO PREVENTS THAT CALCIUM FROM DEPOSTING INTO THE PLAQUE INSIDE YOUR BLOOD VESSELS!

“Dr. Leon Schurgers, who leads the heart research program at the world-renowned Cardiovascular Research Institute in the Netherlands…”did some research on vitamin K2.

“His research shows that this vitamin - which most Western diets are seriously lacking - can slash your risk of heart disease by 57 percent.”

Note that this is on top of any other heart protective actions you may be taking or doing.

“Dr. Schurgers's breakthrough offers a new understanding of the role of calcium in heart disease and how it may be a big factor in most heart attacks.

His study shows that this little-known vitamin can redirect that calcium to where it needs to go in the body and help to keep your arteries clear of plaque.

"We have shown that cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis have common pathways," says Dr. Schurgers. "Studies show that calcium is linked to both diseases."

"Lack of [calcium] in the bones makes them weak," says Dr. Schurgers. "But excessive amounts in the blood leads to cardiovascular disease."

His latest research shows that Vitamin K2 can combat both diseases.

“A diet rich in Vitamin K helps to get calcium into your bones while removing it from your arteries. If your diet is low in vitamin K, you get calcium deposits in your arteries. That leads to plaque and calcification and ends in heart disease and heart attack.”

“Headed up by Dr. Schurgers, the Rotterdam Heart Study followed 4,800 participants for seven years. The study showed that people who got plenty of K2 in their diet had 57 percent fewer heart attacks than those who didn't.

The study also showed that plaque results when calcium leaves your bones and ends up in your arteries.”

(This also happens when you take calcium supplements on an empty stomach.  As we posted recently, that’s why to get calcium in food instead of supplements and if you take calcium supplements to take them only in small amounts right AFTER a small meal.)

Also note that vitamin K2 NOT vitamin K1 is the heart and bone protective one!

“If there's a K2 there's got to be a K1, right? There is. Vitamin K1 is found in leafy green vegetables like spinach.”  (And broccoli and  tea and green tea has decent amounts of K1         also.)

“Researchers at University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands studied 16,057 women for eight years. The women had no coronary heart disease at the start of the study. The study followed their intake of K1 and K2. The women getting K1 had 480 incidents of heart attack over the eight years. But the women getting K2 had nearly a 60 percent lower rate.

Researchers concluded that K1 had little effect on cardiovascular health. But K2 dramatically reduced it.

"K1 has little influence on cardiovascular health," says Dr. Schurgers. "Natural K2 prevents arterial calcium accumulation."”

That is really huge news because studies of "arterial calcium accumulation” find high levels of arterial calcium accumulation far more predictive of future heart attacks than almost all the other heart health measures combined!

Since arterial calcium accumulation is also a big reason people get high blood pressure as they get older because the stiffer blood vessels that result have more friction and less flexibility and responsiveness.

That means that knowing about eating calcium in foods and not taking it in supplements plus taking vitamin K2 is an extremely powerful way to protect your heart and prevent or reduce high blood pressure!

Wikipedia says that "No known toxicity exists for vitamins K1 or K2."  You can get vitamin K2 in 150 mcg doses.  I knew I needed more, so I take the 5,000 mcg of K2 size once a day.

I also have low level high blood pressure which may in part be from calcified plaque.  So I may have done myself a really big favor when I began to take vitamin K2!

It’s pretty simple really, vitamin K2 ensures that your body puts calcium into your bones to strengthen them and takes calcium OUT of the walls of your blood vessels where it can kill you!

Are there foods that have vitamin K2?

Yes but they may not be as good a choice for heart protection as taking the supplement.

The “best food sources of vitamin K2 include cheese, eggs, butter, chicken and beef.”

But these foods when from animals fed grain, cause chronic inflammation from excessive amounts of omega 6 oils.  And, when eaten in excess, they also tend to be harmful from having too much saturated fat.

There are two solutions.

Take K2 supplements.

And/or, eat whole eggs from chickens that at least are cage and antibiotic free.  Eat some very moderate amounts of cheese, butter, chicken and beef BUT if and ONLY if you can get them from animals only pasture or 100 % grass fed.

New breakthrough in fat loss and heart protection....

Today's Post: Thursday, 5-12-2011

Last Sunday, Dr Al Sears sent out an email with some very valuable information.

In fat loss, if your hunger fails to shut off when you are actually full and fed or your body fails to burn fat when you need to access the calories in it, it will be dramatically harder to get rid of the excess fat.

But when you get too fat, the messenger, leptin, which your body uses to do this stops working. Or it stops working well.

Meanwhile, if you eat too much omega 6 oils and too little omega 3 oils and get no exercise, your level of chronic inflammation as measured by the HSCRP (High Sensitivity C Reactive Protein) test.

We already know high levels of C Reactive Protein and high chronic inflammation cause heart disease and help cause many cancers and may also help cause Alzheimer’s disease.

That’s why in our last post, last Tuesday, 5-10, about heart disease risk and reducing it has many details on how to eat less omega 6 and get more omega 3 oils.

We also know that eating ginger and curries with turmeric as spices &/or taking curcumin supplements derived from turmeric lowers inflammation.

Here’s the breakthrough news on fat loss.

Here’s the key quote from Dr Al Sears, “Leptin normally binds to “leptin receptors.” But more fat cells increase inflammation. That makes the liver produce a protein called CRP. And CRP binds to leptin, stops it from reaching its receptors, and blocks its signals.”

He also said, “That is called leptin resistance. And it’s one reason why you may feel hungry all the time, and may not melt fat naturally.”

That’s extremely important to know. And, here’s why it is and is such important news.

1. When you carry too much excess fat, your CRP levels go up and you are more likely to get the diseases caused by the inflammation associated with it.

That’s one of the many reasons why losing your excess fat will help you prevent heart disease.

2. But the more important and useful information is that if you do the other things that lower CRP, your leptin will begin to work properly.

And, when that happens, you will feel full and less hungry when you should and you will burn your fat stores more easily.

That means that using all the other methods that lower inflammation besides losing fat will make it MUCH easier to lose your extra fat.

That’s new. I’d never heard of that before. It gives you an extra way to lose excess fat and make it easier to do and have it stay off!

Dr Sears also adds that the herb Irvingia that has had some press as helping people lose fat or not gain it was found to lower CRP inflammation by 52%.

If that statistic is accurate, it may mean that for people who have high CRP now, taking Irvingia might be well worth doing.

Doing so would sharply increase your heart attack protection for one thing.

But it also means that for the people who have high CRP now, taking Irvingia would also boost their fat loss results.

They would stop being as hungry when they are already full and doing strength training or interval cardio would be more effective at getting rid of their fat.

Dr Sears says he recommends people take 150 mg a day of Irvingia for these two reasons.

This has not yet been well verified that I know of.

BUT, since you can get your HSCRP tested, by getting it tested and then getting retested after taking Irvingia for 2 or 3 months, you might find it does work – in you.

So, for heart attack prevention it may well be worth trying.

And, if you have been eating in a way that boosts inflammation and not exercising, taking Irvingia may also make your fat loss progress faster.

Vitamin D also helps prevent strokes & heart attacks….

Today's Post: Monday, 11-23-2009

Last Monday, 11-16-2009, the AFP online news had a story about a study that was done on 27,686 Utah people of 50 or older with no history of cardiovascular disease to see if being low on blood levels of vitamin D tended to increase the number of people who went on to get heart attacks and strokes.

(The researchers decided to do the study on people from Utah to do it on a group that smoked little if at all and also tended not drink alcohol or to drink it heavily.)

Yikes! The researchers found that people with very low vitamin D levels were 77 % more likely to die early than those with normal levels; 45 % more likely to get some form of cardiovascular disease; 78 percent were more likely to have a stroke, & twice as likely to develop heart failure.

The researchers noted that a large number of people die of these diseases; and study co-author, Heidi May, pointed out that vitamin D deficiency is easily treatable.

The news story also noted that other studies have shown that Vitamin D also helps regulate key body functions such as blood pressure, inflammation and glucose control -- all connected to heart disease.

Two thirds of the people in Utah, they found, do not get enough vitamin D. (The story I saw does not say so. But I believe this was all of the group who had less than 30 ng/ml.)

Their very low group had blood levels of less than 15 ng/ml and the group considered high or normal had over 30 ng/ml.

X*X* X* X*X* X*

They reports I’ve gotten suggest that optimum blood levels of vitamin D are closer to 80 to 100 ng/ml.

I’ve also heard that one of the most predictive measures of heart attack risk is the calcification of arterial plaque; and that blood levels of 80 to 100 ng/ml of vitamin D help to prevent this from happening or getting worse and may even help reverse it.

Since the human body will tend to use 3,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 if it’s available; vitamin D also helps boost immunity preventing both colds & flu and many cancers plus it helps prevent the SAD form of depression; AND 1,000 iu capsules of vitamin D3 are so inexpensive, it looks like taking 2,000 iu a day or somewhat more of vitamin D3 in addition to the 400 iu in your multivitamin, may be extremely protective – and even easy to do.

In fact, doing this one thing is beginning to look like as valuable a way to protect your health as getting regular exercise or NOT smoking.