Heartache Continued...

In this, to-be-continued edition, I wanted to follow-up on the discussion of last week where I explained that conventional thinking on the cause of heart disease is being challenged.  In case you missed, everyone still agrees that ischemia (a lack of blood flow and oxygen to the heart) is the cause of heart attack.  What is being called into question is mechanism that the build-up of cholesterol in the coronary arteries is the major cause of this ischemia.  The new research is showing that this is merely a symptom and the real cause has to do with the nervous system; in particular a lack of nerve flow from the Vagus nerve.

The Vagus nerve is considered the major parasympathetic nerve in the body that regulates the function of most every major organ in the body.  Your nervous system is broken into two parts – the parasympathetic and the sympathetic.  This sympathetic is more commonly considered your fight-flight nervous system that speeds up your heart and lungs as well as other organ function for survival needs.  The parasympathetic does the opposite and serves to slow down the heart and lungs.  It’s easiest to think of the sympathetic as the gas and the parasympathetic as the brakes.  Different lifestyle factors affect the “tone” of the nervous system and shift us into fight-flight mode just like changing the tuning of a guitar.  These factors are the standard poor habits including chronic stress, lack of sleep, sugar, trans-fats, smoking, and processed grains.  When we stay in a revved-up or sympathetic state, adrenaline levels go up and the metabolism of the heart muscle shifts from fat fuel sources to sugar metabolism.  This will result in a dramatic increase in lactic acid production in the muscle cells of the heart.  This creates an acidosis in the muscle that prevents calcium from entering into the cells effectively, thereby making the heart muscle cells less able to contract.  These cells begin to swell and malfunction which is the basic mechanism of ischemia to the heart cells or more commonly, “heart attack.”

Your take-home on this should be that there is much more to heart disease than plaque build-up of the coronary arteries.  Cholesterol is an effect, not a cause!  When all we do to prevent heart disease is take drugs to lower cholesterol, the result is death from heart attack with better looking cholesterol numbers.  What we should be doing is engaging in stress-reducing activity such as exercise and meditation, embracing loving relationships, increasing the fruits and vegetables in our diet, drinking water in place of sugar drinks, making adequate sleep a priority, and taking time to be grateful for what we have rather than stressing over what we don’t have.  These are the very activities that move us out of fight-flight and into a more parasympathetic state that has been proven to be healing to the heart (and also cholesterol).   So if you’re still looking to make meaningful lifestyle changes, there are about seven options for you to choose from.

It’s a Heartache

I recently found an article that challenged everything that we thought we knew about the cause of heart disease and heart attacks.  Since one out of every two Americans will die of heart disease, this caught my attention.  Traditionally, we are taught to believe that heart attacks occur due to problems in the coronary (heart) arteries.  But new research is suggesting that the problems likely happen as a result of event happening in the muscle of the heart known as the myocardium.

So, heart disease is caused by a lack of oxygen to the heart muscle from a buildup of plaque in the arteries as a result of excessive cholesterol, right? And preventing heart disease comes from opening those arteries by reducing cholesterol and various emergency procedures such as coronary bypass, stents, or angioplasty?  Well, that’s what most of the free world believes.  However, doctors and researchers alike are starting to question this conventional thinking due to the results of a couple recent studies.  First, angiogram studies, where radiographic dye is injected into the coronary arteries and observed, shows that blood gets to the heart even where the major coronary arteries are completely blocked off.  Another 2003 study conducted at the Mayo clinic concluded that bypass surgeries, stents, and angioplasty can indeed relieve symptoms of heart disease such as chest pain, but that they do not prevent further heart attacks.  The explanation for this is that shortly after birth, a normal heart develops an extensive network of what are called collateral blood vessels that will provide numerous alternate routes for blood flow.  Think of this as taking the scenic route when the highway is blocked.  In fact, the body is so smart that even when a blockage does develop in a coronary artery, these collateral arteries can grow new, at any age, to bypass and reroute the blockage.  Nobody is trying to say that high cholesterol, especially the inflammatory LDL’s is a good thing; they’re just saying that this is not the end of the story with heart disease.  If this were true, don’t you think that, with all the cholesterol drugs that have been given out along with all the emergency and preventive procedures performed, there would have been a dent in heart disease over the last 30-40 years?

So what is really going on?  The researchers performing these newer studies believe it comes back to the effect the nervous system is having on the heart and particularly the rate of your heart.  Your nervous system is broken into a fight/flight or sympathetic side as well as a parasympathetic side that is considered to be active when we sleep, heal, and digest (or relax).  The major parasympathetic nerve (the Vagus) comes off the brainstem and serves to slow and relax the heart.  Multiple studies have shown that a decrease of parasympathetic nerve flow results in ischemic heart disease where the oxygen is being cut off.  Next week, I would like to discuss how this happens and what the real-life factors are contributing to this #1 killer in America.

For a more in depth look at your bloodwork and LDL's, our office is doing bloodwork through Boston Heart labs. If you're interested in scheduling bloodwork with us, call the office at 812-273-4325.

The Truth about Sugar

I know that many of you have had the opportunity see the movie Fed Up.  In fact, nearly 100 people came to our community showing of the film at the Red Bicycle a couple years ago.  If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie focuses on the American obesity epidemic and how our modern diet is directly linked to the chronic disease that afflicts approximately 80% of our society as the primary cause of death.

We’ve always been told that the solution to weight loss is to eat less and exercise more.  This implies that obesity is simply a matter of calories in versus calories out.  But what if not all calories are created equally?  Obviously exercise is necessary for better health and it should be looked at similar to getting a vital nutrient.  But if you’re trying to exercise yourself out of obesity or excess weight while eating the wrong diet, you’re fighting an uphill battle that you will never win.  Modern science and the rules of physiology prove that the quality of the calories ingested is what really matters.  For instance, when you take in a healthy, natural carbohydrate such as a vegetable or most fruits there are calories from sugar.  But those calories are bound to fiber that slows the release of sugar into the bloodstream thereby keeping insulin levels low and allowing those calories to be burned more slowly.  This is normal physiology from healthy food.  However, when you ingest the sugar that’s in junk food such as soda or candy or even a processed carbohydrate such as white bread, snack foods, or most cereals, there’s not much fiber there.  This causes a large surge of sugar that raises blood sugar, increases insulin, and immediately gets sent to the liver to be stored as cholesterol and fat.  This is unhealthy physiology that leads to obesity and chronic illness such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and stroke.  It’s all about the sugar including the processed sugars such as high fructose corn syrup.  Believe or not, the same phenomenon happens with the fructose found in fruit juice and even with artificial sweeteners found in diet drinks and foods.  Unfortunately about 80% of the food you find in the grocery store has added sugar or artificial sugars.  As a result, between 1977 and 2000, Americans have doubled their intake of sugar.

Hopefully, this is all impactful information to you, and I could go on.  But how do you make change and how do you get your family to begin cutting the sugar?  The first step is to begin planning your meals in advance and make a real commitment to get back into your kitchen and start cooking real food – this is the stuff that is found on the perimeters of the grocery stores and rarely sold in a cardboard box or plastic bag!  We’re doing a wellness talk in April to help you with this. Sign up for “The Truth about Sugar” by calling our office at 812-273-4325 or sign up on Facebook or Eventbrite.