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The Real Cause of the Heart Disease Pandemic
The Real Cause of the Heart Disease Pandemic
By Shane Ellison, M.Sc.
One minute you are enjoying a stroll in the park, and the next you feel as if an elephant is stepping on you. Clutching your chest and gasping for air, you suffer the eventual outcome of heart disease: a heart attack. This year alone, this silent killer will catch up with over a million Americans. Each and every one of them will die prematurely under that unfortunate scenario.
Worldwide, heart disease will kill more people than any other affliction. The good news is that it can be stopped.
The underlying cause of a heart attack is narrowing of the arteries. The process is known medically as "atherosclerosis." Cardiologists like to describe atherosclerosis as a plumbing problem: Fat and cholesterol-laden gunk gradually builds up within the arteries, they say. If this build-up (plaque) grows thick enough, it eventually plugs an affected "pipe." This keeps nutrients and oxygen-rich blood from reaching their intended tissues. (This is technically known as ischemia.) Blood-starved tissues die. When a part of the cardiac muscle or the brain is affected, a heart attack or stroke occurs.
In 2004, Time magazine told the world that there's just one problem with the hypothesis that fat and cholesterol is the culprit: "Sometimes it's dead wrong." Fact is, more than half the people who suffer from heart attacks have "low cholesterol." "High" cholesterol (300-350 mg/dL) is a natural and healthy part of aging. And the higher their total blood cholesterol is, the longer people live.
But drug companies have convinced people otherwise - while profiting immensely.
If fat and cholesterol were the culprit in heart disease, these ubiquitous substances would clog the entire 100,000 miles of adult veins, arteries, and capillaries. Instead, 90 percent of the time, heart disease is caused by the narrowing of the spaghetti-sized coronary arteries - those that rest over the heart. The rest of the cardiovascular system that nourishes the body remains perfectly healthy, despite being loaded with cholesterol and fat.
This common-sense observation renders the cholesterol and fat theory of heart disease obsolete.
Coronary arteries bear little resemblance to pipes. Instead, they are made up of muscle sandwiched between two "structural" layers. When the artery muscle becomes inflamed, atherosclerosis can set in. This is initiated by damage to the innermost structural layer that faces the bloodstream. And science has made great strides in identifying what causes damage to this layer.
Aside from smoking, the biggest culprit in today's heart attack pandemic is high blood sugar. It leads to a condition known as insulin resistance or early Type II diabetes. Insulin resistance causes blood sugar to float in the blood longer than it should. Muscle no longer vacuums it from the bloodstream. Over time, blood sugar reacts with amino acids that are floating nearby. The product of this reaction is an "advance glycated end" (AGE) product.
AGE products cut and stab deeply into the structural layers of coronary arteries. Medically, this is termed glycation. The "slicing and dicing" of their coronary arteries explains why diabetics have four times the risk of heart attack relative to non-diabetics. Overcome with high blood sugar, they are susceptible to the butchering process of AGE products.
Coronary arteries are most susceptible to AGE products, because they are so close to the mechanical stress of the heartbeat. Arteries not subject to mechanical stress are not as sensitive to the butchering.
Damage caused by AGE products leads to "crosslinking." Once crosslinking occurs, supple, healthy coronary arteries become rigid. This is how the word atherosclerosis was derived. It combines two Greek words, athere (porridge) and sclerosis (hardening). The rigidity is the result of inflammation (caused by plaque) that leads to narrowing.
Fortunately, narrowing of the coronary arteries is not a death sentence. Healthy arteries have the ability to accommodate the inflammation by "relaxing" or dilating. This ensures that blood flow continues without interruption - and that heart disease goes unnoticed.
This protective ability of healthy arteries is dependent on the short-lived molecule known as nitric oxide. Without it, excessive narrowing of arteries can manifest into hypertension, poor circulation, and a decreased tolerance for exercise.
Nutritional approaches that maximize nitric oxide (such as supplementing with l-arginine and grape seed extract) have proven to be a bonanza for heart disease patients who want to curb their annoying symptoms naturally.
Most heart attacks and strokes creep up on victims when inflammation goes haywire. This is typical among Americans, because inflammation-causing sugar has become such a dominant ingredient in their food. The overly aggressive inflammation (which occurs within - not on - arterial walls) causes plaque to rupture. The rupturing triggers the emergence of a blood clot (thrombus). The combination of narrow arteries and a blood clot seals the victim's fate, along with his coronary arteries. He has a heart attack.
Understanding this model of heart disease gives us a wildly effective way to prevent the pandemic killer: Control blood sugar. Here are some good ways to do it:
1. Interval training can lower blood sugar by up to 40 percent. (To put this into perspective, the commonly prescribed drug Metformin lowers blood sugar by a paltry 19 percent, while putting users at risk of obesity ... if they can tolerate the vomiting and diarrhea.)
2. Nutritional supplementation with magnesium (400 mg/day) was found to improve high blood sugar among elderly individuals. Research shows that a magnesium deficiency inhibits insulin from escorting glucose out of the bloodstream into muscles. The end result is insulin resistance and an increased risk of heart attack. Magnesium aspartate has been shown to be the best-absorbed form of magnesium.
3. Tannic acid from the banaba leaf (a medicinal plant that grows in India, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines) mimics the actions of insulin by eliciting glucose transport from the bloodstream into muscle.
The safe and effective blood-sugar-lowering effect of tannic acid has caught the attention of Big Pharma. Many drug companies are working rigorously to create a synthetic knock-off.
4. Increasing fiber intake with a tablespoon of psyllium husk (the crushed seeds of the Plantage ovata plant) prevents dangerous spikes in blood sugar after a meal.
Controlling blood sugar has become the hottest area of medical research. It suggests a single way to not only ameliorate heart disease, but a host of other diseases caused by high blood sugar as well. These include, but are not limited to, diabetes, cancer, and even Alzheimer's. Instead of dosing patients up with a handful of drugs to treat a handful of diseases, controlling blood sugar naturally is a remedy for all three.
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