Heart Health

by Andre Camelli

Well hello everybody, we’re here with another exciting class, this class is going to be focused on taking care of our heart. Everybody has understood the importance of the heart, without the heart- heart stops, we stop. So, we want to take a quick peek at some of the key, key ingredients of heart health and cardiovascular well being. #1 misconception is that everybody thinks that cholesterol is the culprit for heart disease, and everyone things high blood pressure is the culprit and the reality is high blood pressure and cholesterol are only the effects, ok, and what we need to look at if we really want to be successful in taking care of our heart. We want to look at some of these causative factors, ok. And why is the blood pressure elevated? And why is the cholesterol elevated? Why are the ratios of good cholesterol to bad cholesterol, why are they outta whack? Why are triglycerides out of whack? And what we really want to look at is what’s going on to increase heart disease. And heart disease itself, actually, all the research aims towards stress, so let’s take a good look at stress. When we’re under stress, we’ve got to look at what happens. What happens to heart disease, ok. First thing, blood pressure elevates as a result of stress. If we were in a jungle and a lion came out to attack us, what would happen to our blood pressure? It would go up. You know, what would happen to every factor regarding stress. When we’re under stress, we would see a secretion of cortisol. These are all short term strategies to deal with a life or death situation like a tiger or a lion attacking us. But what we don’t understand is that this lion or tiger in this day and age is attacking us in different areas. It’s attacking us at work. We’re perceiving job stress as like a lion. We’re actually getting stress hormones secreted at work, at home, in relationships. We’re seeing that as a stress. Arguments- huge stress on the heart. And what we’re seeing is that every little thing out there, if we perceive it as a stress, the body is going to secrete these hormones, it’s going to elevate the blood pressure. It’s actually going to thicken up the blood and cause the arteries to constrict. And what they noticed was even people in the midst of a fake argument- fake scenarios- they’ve actually studied their blood pressure and they’ve actually studied the cardiovascular risk factors and what they’re seeing is it’s the stress that’s causing elevations of blood pressure, it’s the stress that’s stiffening up the arteriole walls, it’s the stress of life that is causing this problem. So to fix the cause, we have to fix the stress, ok. And there’s some very, very important strategies regarding stress, ok. First thing, most important, getting regular chiropractic care. Is the number 1 de-stressing technique out there. We take stress off the nerve supply to the heart. We take stress off the nerve supply to all these internal organs and glands. We take stress off the nervous system so it’s in a more relaxed and restful state. So not letting stress accumulate is the number one goal of regular ongoing chiropractic care. So we really need to take a peek at looking at chiropractic as a stress management tool. Ok. Number 2 is we have instrumentation called biofeedback devices. The biofeedback device is called heart rate variability. And this is a heart specific biofeedback. And what we’re looking at is with heart specific biofeedback, we’re looking at ways to relax our heart, and to allow our heart, our brain and our breathing to become in synchrony. They call it coherence. Excellent book is called The Heart Math Solution. Excellent book and they actually have home biofeedback devices at very reasonable prices. If you don’t have a computer they have a product called the M Wave, which doesn’t require a computer and then there’s another company that makes a heart rate variability that’s portable, it’s called the stress eraser. But both of these will show you how to relax your heart and relax your stress levels just by changing your breathing and changing your thoughts. Ok, so step 1, regular chiropractic care to not let stress accumulate on the nervous system, step 2 is to understand your role and using biofeedback and using a daily stress outlet which leads us to stress number 3, regular exercise. Regular exercise is excellent. Excellent for reducing stress, so we want a good size of cardiovascular care. And cardiovascular and aerobic exercise are very, very, very unique in that we have studied long term cardiovascular effects. What we don’t want is to make it boring and monotonous. What we actually look at as far as cardiovascular efficiency and cardiovascular fitness is what’s called high intensity interval training, or HIT training. High intensity interval training. And that is where you bring the heart rate up fairly high for a minute or two and then you rest for one minute. And then you bring it up for a minute or two fairly high and then you rest for a minute. The easiest way to do this, again, assuming that you don’t have any issues with your joints is to go to a kettlebell class. Kettlebell is a type of exercise that requires your heart rate to go very high for one or two minutes and then you rest for one minute and you do that and each week you’ll add an interval. So you’ll start out doing just two or three intervals the first week. The next week you’ll add a fourth. The week after that, you’ll add the fifth. But really, this gets you to only have to work out one or two times a week to get a really, really great workout, and kettlebell workouts can be customized to where they’re under 30 minutes. They’re very quick and they also incorporate resistance training. So you’re actually working your muscles out at the same time so you don’t have to go to a gym and pump iron. Kettlebell is a small little piece of equipment and if you want some really good instructional DVDs they have- its called artofstrength.com and the trainers name is Anthony Delugio. He’s out of Rhode Island. He is the number one kettlebell instructor here in North America and his dvds are readily available. You can get the most basic dvd. He has a couple that are just, ones called the kettlebell clinic and it just shows you the basic technique if you want to get your technique down and then the next one after kettlebell clinic if you want a really great workout that you can slowly build up on is called Providence. It’s for all fitness levels and he’ll tell you how to measure your kettlebell, you know, to match your size and your fitness level, but really quick ways for cardiovascular and aerobic improvement and efficiency.

The next strategy of course is nutrition. Ok, what we want to look at with cardiovascular protection, the nutrients that are going to give us the most bang for our buck. And the number one nutrient that comes to mind is essential fatty acids or omega 3 fatty acid. You get these from a purified fish oil. Eating fish right now isn’t the safest thing because we have polluted our oceans and we have high mercury content and other toxins present in the fish so we need a purified form of fish oil. And if we take even 1 tablespoon of omega 3 purified fish oil it reduces our risk of cardiovascular disease, heart attacks and strokes by over 45%. And that’s just fish oil alone. That’s not exercise, that’s not getting adjusted, that’s not managing our mental and emotional stress, I mean this is just nutrition alone. So getting fish oil in there, getting a good whole food source of vitamin C- excellent for our cardiovascular system. Beware of vitamin C disguised as ascorbic acid. You look at the label and it will say vitamin C and then in parenthesis it’ll say ascorbic acid. We don’t want to take vitamin C as ascorbic acid. It has been shown by the heart research symposium to actually increase cardiovascular and carotid artery closure by 72%. Actually increases cardiovascular problems because ascorbic acid is a synthetic isolate of the whole vitamin C complex. Ok, what we want is a whole food C, and getting a whole food C, the number one company that we use is a company out of Wisconsin called Standard Process. They have something called Cataplex C and that is again, a whole food C. Ok, if you don’t want to get into supplementation, easy ways to getting vitamin C- get a citrus juicer. They cost like twelve dollars at the store, fourteen dollars. And juice your own grapefruits and your own oranges. You can also get high levels of vitamin C in a lot of organic fruits and vegetables. Again, we want to get lots of healthy vitamin C. The other one that is huge for cardiovascular health is vitamin D. We want to get plenty of sunlight exposure. Remember sunlight is the number one way we get vitamin D. You can get nice purified cod liver oils. It’s called Blue Ice cod liver oil. It’s basically a fermented cod liver oil that they have in capsules. That’s probably one of the best companies to get your cod liver oil, but that has a very high level of D. If you live in areas where you’re not getting adequate sunlight or you have a job that’s inside a building where there’s not a lot of windows and you’re not getting light exposure, consider supplementing. Instead of using the purified fish oil, use a purified cod liver oil. Because you’re going to not only get your essential fatty acids and your omega 3’s, but you’re also going to get adequate vitamin D. Ok, so vegetable rich diet, diet rich in essential fatty acids, regular chiropractic care, regular biofeedback. You know, all of these are just key elements to heart health. And then of course implementing an exercise routine that is going to be suitable for your particular fitness level. If you have issues, if you have bad knees, it doesn’t give you and excuse not to move and exercise. There’s lots of things you can do. Most every community has a community pool that has classes that are non weight bearing, that are in the pool. You know, arthritis classes where you get in there, water aerobics. You get in there and you move and you get your heart rate elevated. Remember, real simple things- understanding stress, understanding the roles of chiropractic, understanding the role of regular fun exercise and good nutrition. You know these are all basic components of heart health and if you follow these simple guidelines, you can rest assured to have a healthy heart for the rest of your life.