How Air Pollution is Harming Your Health – InVite Health Podcast, Episode 277
When we look at air pollution in this country and throughout the world, we can see the true harmful long-lasting effect, especially on our heart health.
Tag: heart
The Science Behind Cocoa For Overall Health – InVite Health Podcast, Episode 249
Cocoa is a plant-based, food-based antioxidant that has so many benefits when it comes to our health. Here’s what you need to know.
Helping The Heart Stay Healthy – InVite Health Podcast, Episode 244
I think it’s safe to say that most Americans strive to live long, healthy lives. However, many people do fall short of that and chronic disease becomes a major problem. We see this becoming more of an exponential growth over time and there are many different factors that play into this. We can look at diet and our exposure to different pollutants that can have a negative impact on heart health and brain health.
Today, I want to focus in on heart disease specifically because we know that this is a major problem in the United States. Heart disease is the leading cause of death for men and women throughout the United States and close to 700,000 Americans die from heart disease each year. That’s one in every four deaths throughout this country, or we can break it down and say one person dies every 36 seconds in the United States from cardiovascular disease. I think we should bring attention to why we should be more proactive when it comes to heart health rather than reactive. We don’t want to wait until something is wrong with our heart before we take action.
Heart disease and heart attacks
We can break heart disease into different subsections. We can look at coronary artery disease, which is the most common type of heart disease.
We can also look at heart attacks. Roughly around 800,000 Americans each year have a heart attack. For many people, heart attacks are a silent process and there is significant damage done to the heart muscle itself, even though you may be unaware that you actually had a heart attack. About one in five heart attacks is actually known as a silent heart attack, where there is significant damage done, but yet you are unaware of that. Maybe it’s a situation where you do have some shortness of breath, some heaviness within the chest area and then that passes, and it wasn’t ever to the degree of severity that you felt the need to go seek medical attention.
This is why we certainly like to be able to understand more about this. When we look at Americans who are at a greater risk for the development of heart disease, this is where the problem really comes in because we understand the trifecta of things such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, metabolic syndrome and obesity.
For more information about the increased risk for heart disease, tune into the full podcast episode.
What can we do to protect our heart health?
I want to talk about some of the different things that you can be doing when it comes to lifestyle modifications, making sure that you are doing things such as heart-healthy foods, which in turn would brain-healthy foods, which in turn would be whole-body healthy foods. This is why I’m such a stickler about sticking to the Mediterranean diet because the Mediterranean-style diet really does encompass all of those main nutrients that the body needs at that cellular level in order to thrive. Getting that full spectrum of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants, along with good, healthy fats and proteins, is important. This is why adherence to that Mediterranean-style diet has been shown time after time in terms of scientific research as being the best choice when it comes to overall health. When we look at the cardiovascular studies done with the Mediterranean diet, we recognize just how beneficial that is for the heart.
Tune into the full podcast episode for some studies relating to heart disease and overall heart health.
The Numerous Benefits of Aged Garlic – InVite Health Podcast, Episode 239
Garlic has many well-studied cardiovascular benefits, but it goes well beyond that. Aged Garlic has many benefits, including immune health.
Why Coenzyme Q10 Ubiquinol Is So Important – InVite Health Podcast, Episode 233
Coenzyme Q10 is a powerful antioxidant that has been studied in the support of energy production and heart health.
How To Optimize Heart Health – InVite Health Podcast, Episode 210
heart
Invite Health Podcast, Episode hosted by Amanda Williams, MPH.
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I want to talk a little bit today about heart health. There are many different nutrients that you can be utilizing to support overall heart health, on top of, of course, adhering to a healthy diet. We do know that foods make a huge impact on the health of not just our heart, but the vascular system and everything in totality. When people follow a Standard American Diet, it can really do some significant damage to the cardiovascular system.
Supporting Healthy Blood Pressure
Hypertension is when you have elevated blood pressure. An optimal blood pressure, let’s just say, would be 115/75. For many people, we know that that is a hard feat to come by. There’s different reasons as to why one would have elevations in blood pressure. We can look at dietary issues that bring this on. We can look at the sedentary lifestyle that we certainly know can bring this on. There are so many people who are on so many medications to try to control and regulate their blood pressure, which oftentimes is extremely necessary in order to make sure that that pressure doesn’t get to a really harmful level. We also have to recognize that many times those medications then drive up different nutrient deficiencies in the body, which can be a problem in and of itself. What’s really quite interesting is that many of the key nutrients that get depleted from these drugs are things such as coenzymeQ10 and magnesium, both of which are essential to heart and vascular functions. But yet, these medications are continuously prescribed without advice to also be supplementing with nutrients like coQ10 and magnesium. If you’re taking these medications, be sure to take at minimum a multivitamin to try to cover those gaps.†
The Benefits of Taurine On Your Heart – InVite Health Podcast, Episode 189. Listen Now >>
For more information about hypertension, tune into the full podcast episode.
Supporting a healthy heart
An arrhythmia is a really common issue that occurs when people have an irregular rhythm. People are often put on a blood thinner to try to prevent a potential life-threatening event such as a stroke, but they never really look to see if the arrhythmia is being brought on by a magnesium deficiency. We know that the magnesium is not only important for the relaxation of both the smooth and skeletal muscle, but also important for the electrical conduction system of how the heart itself fires. If we have this misfiring, this can cause this irregular heart rhythm, hence an arrhythmia. Magnesium is kind of that key component to overall cardiovascular health because it helps with allowing the blood vessels to remain more relaxed and dilated, so we can get optimal flow through those blood vessels, which is certainly something that we should all hope to achieve.†
How A Magnesium Deficiency Impacts Your Health – InVite Health Podcast, Episode 184. Listen Now >>
Nutrients for Heart Health
We know that the amino acid L-arginine also plays this really significant role when it comes to the release of nitric oxide. The more nitric oxide, the more vasodilation that we have. Magnesium and L-arginine are two nutrients I look to when someone is experiencing peaks and valleys in the blood pressure.†
We can also look at hawthorn extract, which we know is also very supportive when we look at maintaining healthy blood pressure, but it actually works as a cardio tonic. This basically refers to any type of a compound that has the ability to allow for proper contractions within the heart muscle itself. If the heart is out of rhythm, having a nutrient such as hawthorn extract certainly can be beneficial.†
Tune into the full podcast episode to learn more about hawthorn extract and additional nutrients that can help optimize your heart health.
Thank you for tuning in to the Invite Health Podcast. You can find all of our episodes for free wherever you listen to podcasts or by visiting www.invitehealth.com/podcast. Make sure you subscribe and leave us a review! Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at Invite Health today. We’ll see you next time on another episode of the Invite Health Podcast.
