What really causes heart attacks? Majority of very smart people will tell you immediately and they are partially right, that heart attacks are caused by eating too much of saturated fat, not exercising enough, eating cholesterol rich foods like eggs, eating trans fats, drinking too much coke and eating too many cookies.
Inflammation and heart disease
Yes, not exercising enough, eating bad diet and drinking soda are very bad for your heart and they will eventually cause the hart to fail working properly. But the main reason, why heart attacks happen is inflammation. Inflammation in our bodies creates great conditions for heart disease.
There is always certain level of inflammation in our bodies and it is ok. When your knee hurts, when your tooth hurts, when you cut yourself, fighting a flu or when you brake a bone. However our body is able to deal with this kind of inflammation just fine. The main problem is the extra inflammation we are causing to ourselves.
If this extra inflammation is the main reason why heart attacks eventually happen, and it really is, than we have to find out what creates this extra inflammation and avoid it.
4 main causes of inflammation in our body:
Poor diet – mostly sugar, refined flour, processed foods and trans fatty rich foods.
Lack of exercise
Too much stress
Toxins in environment such as mercury and pesticides
Low energy and inflammation
Do you feel tired and out of energy often? While part of it might be your overall motivation and enthusiasm, part of it is certainly inflammation in your body. Inflammation that is caused mainly by your diet and overall activity level.
I am by nature very motivated and enthusiastic person. I don’t even know what the bad mood means. I seem to be always in a good mood. Unless you pull the plug and drain the ocean, you can always, and I really mean that see me smiling and enjoying every moment of my days. But the last Saturday I didn’t get to have my fun surfing workout and I ate some crappy Indian food. And you certainly didn’t want to be around me at all this day. I was in a bad mood, with the foggy mind, tired and I was barking on everybody like a mean dog. It really made me realize, how important these two things are – physical exercise and perfect diet. They can really ruin your day, if you don’t take them seriously.
6 ways to fight extra inflammation:
1. Eat whole foods – high fiber mainly plant based diet, rich in fruits and green leafy vegetables with optimal protein consumption coming mainly from small fish like sardines, wild salmon, mackerel, anchovies, eggs, chicken, turkey, tofu and some whole dairy products like probiotic buttered unsweetened milk, white yogurt and cottage cheese.
2. Eat healthy fat – monounsaturated fats like olive oil, all kinds of nuts, avocados, omega 3 fats that mainly small fish contain. You don’t have to be afraid of saturated fat, just don’t go overboard, eating too much of it. Those naturally occurring in dairy products, and animal products if not over consumed are not inflammatory to your body. Avoid trans fats.
3. Regular exercise – mounting evidence shows that regular exercise has huge anti inflammatory effect on our body. Regular exercise strengthens your cardiovascular system, improves immunity system and reduces stress among many other benefits. That makes it a strong inflammation fighter.
4. Relax – don’t pick up many more responsibilities in your already demanding job. If it’s required, than just quit! If you can’t afford to quit, than rearrange your life, so leaving you stressful demanding job, you already hate is an option. And actively relax by hanging out a lot in nature and taking frequent breathing breaks.
5. Eat some natural probiotics for your gut – eat some probiotic rich unsweetened dairy like kefir, buttered milk, cottage cheese, yogurt. Non pasteurized Sauerkraut and some pickles are rich in probiotics too.
6. Stay away from chemicals – toxins are all around us. Try to avoid them. One of the best way to avoid toxins is not to buy new stuff like cars, houses, furniture, toys, toxic carpets and flooring or just buy everything made with natural ingredients. The new stuff out gasses toxic gasses for few years. When you get 3 year old used car, all the outgassing already happened and you don’t have to breath those toxic chemicals.
What really causes heart attack?
No, eggs don’t cause heart attacks. I eat about 20 of them per week and so should you. Egg is the power food. Not even trans fats cause heart attacks. The inflammation that happens in your arteries mainly because of processed poor diet and lack of exercise does cause heart attacks.
Excessive insulin production and sugar spikes from eating sweetened and white flour loaded foods create the highest, most dangerous inflammation in our bodies. This inflammation damages arteries where fertile condition for plugging happen. And heart attack becomes unavoidable.
When you exercise regularly and intensively you are helping your own pancreas manage these sugar spikes by improving insulin sensitivity. And that is a huge anti-inflammatory factor. Add perfect diet to it and you will become the person that is not supporting statins selling pharmaceutical companies with healthy cardiovascular system.
Toxins in your environment and stress will not have very much effect to your body inflammation if you do those two things right – exercise regularly and eat healthy unprocessed diet free of sugar and rich in vegetables and fruits. They both make your body to calm down and rest more effectively so you are not overstressed. Plus they create an environment for your body to successfully deal with these toxins. My heavily smoking grand father was the perfect example of this. But if you don’t do those two highly anti-inflammatory things right, toxins in your environment and too much stress will magnify the inflammation in your body.
So basically, if you are overweight sedentary person with poor diet, your body is on fire all the time. Inflammation is there to stay unless you change your lifestyle radically. What is causing heart attack is not really that interesting to you. Why? Because deep down you already know what is causing it. But you are not willing to give up the good stuff – the couch, chips and coke and cookies. Anyway, you will be facing some near death situation probably not that long from now. If you get out of it alive, than you might change. Good luck!