Image by Miroslav Kaclík from Pixabay
This being February, and willingly being cliche, we are focusing on the heart! And not the mushy Valentine stuff. We are focusing on anatomy, physiology and care of the heart. We hope this month will be “heartening” for your health journey
The heart gets a bunch of airtime as an organ in the media. When was the last time you read about your liver and how to care for it? (We will in the future btw) Some of the media’s information is ok, but most of it is marginal if not downright misleading. What is not misleading is that way too many people die from heart disease every year and most of it is preventable. And, gasp, it doesn’t involve statins.
The indisputable part we all know about the heart is that it’s a pump! Blood comes in and blood goes out. It works relentlessly, it can take a lot of abuse, and it is capable of healing.
So, in this week’s blog we will present things you might not know about the heart. We will follow with a few signs and symptoms that can alert you to a heart under stress, well before a heart attack happens. Next week Abbey will give you the heads up on nutrition for a better heart. Also, this month we will give you a few ideas about diet and exercise to make your heart work better.
Here we go:
The cardiovascular system is composed of the heart and blood vessels. And by extension what is good for one is generally good for the other. Keep in mind as we move forward that we are really talking about a system, cardiovascular, and not an isolated organ, the heart. We will, however, use the terms interchangeably.
The heart is a pear-shaped, fist-sized object weighing less than a pound. It contracts and relaxes about 50-70x a minute depending on your age, weight and overall health. Less if you are a well-trained athlete (the lowest I have ever read about belonged to a world champion cyclist at 28 beats per minute.) More if you are a couch potato. For the rest of us that makes about 3 billion contractions over the course of a normal lifespan. Incredible.
No surprises so far, right? However, consider the following…
Although genetic and hereditary factors contribute to cardiovascular disease, diet and lifestyle habits are more important. Being sedentary, smoking, unmanaged stress, obesity, poor diet, and a lack of essential nutrients required by the heart are all risk factors for heart disease. Thankfully, the heart is the single most responsive tissue in the body to nutritional intervention. (Don’t miss this folks, your HEART CAN HEAL with nutrition!)
The heart also serves as an excellent discriminator of the quality of nutritional supplements. Your heart knows the difference between real food (Standard Process) and synthetic (Costco). By using a technology known as a heart sound recorder, countless patients have proven that high potency synthetic vitamins never replace the appropriate whole food natural supplement. Let food be thy medicine! And synthetic be your motor oil! (My friend and colleague Dr. Steven Key has a heart sound recorder if you are interested 208-965-2128)
And yet diet is still the cornerstone of maintaining cardiovascular health. Refined carbohydrates and highly processed foods put a large burden on the heart specifically and the CV system by extension. Things such as table sugar, fructose, syrups, puffed cereal grains, processed flours, things that come in boxes and have tons of “ingredients” listed on the label, all raise blood sugar. This triggers a rise in insulin. Insulin helps the body store excess sugar and typically does so as fat. Fat makes your heart work harder! This added burden of excess sugar stimulates cholesterol formation and arteriosclerosis (hardening of the arteries). High blood sugar can also cause a deficiency of the essential nutrients that hearts require to stay healthy. High blood sugar robs the heart of the good things it needs to work correctly. It has been said that CV disease is a disease of deficiency (thank you, excess blood sugar). Because this robs nutrients from the heart, due to elevated blood sugar, excessive or processed carbohydrates are your heart’s worst enemy. As bad as fried foods and hydrogenated fats are for you, refined carbohydrates (Breads, cereals, pasta, etc) are far worse. Eating a diet rich in nutrients, whole foods, and low in processed junk, is wise. Foods like meat, fish, eggs, and vegetables are simple choices.
How do you know if your heart is already in need of some love?
Here are some things to look for:
High blood pressure
Low blood pressure
Hands and feet go to sleep easily
You sigh frequently
You are breathing heavily
High altitude discomfort
You open windows in a closed room
Susceptible to colds and fevers
Afternoon yawner
Get drowsy often
Swollen ankles worse at night
Muscle cramps, worse during exercise, get “charlie horses”
Shortness of breath on exertion
Dull pain in the chest or radiating into the left arm, worse with exertion
Bruise easily
Frequent nose bleeds
Noises in head or ringing in the ears
Please don’t get caught in the trap of thinking that if you have one of these systems you are in trouble. You may or may not be. Many of these signs and symptoms overlap with other body systems like the adrenal glands. The body functions as an integrated whole and health care should be approached with this in mind. The cardiovascular system is one system of many that must be coordinated. Nothing exists in isolation.
On a very simple level we can muscle test you in the office and see what you respond to. It is entirely possible that a small intervention now could save you a big one later.
Schedule a time for us to chat with you and let’s see if we can help.
Cheers,
ks