Fight Off Heart Disease
By Tony Craig
Copyright 2011 Tony Craig
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ISBN Number: 978-1-4659-9732-6
Acknowledgements
Cover: Rita Toews www.yourebookcover.com/
Ebook Creation: Matt Buttsworth www.ebooksformatting.com
Caring for Your Heart
In this book I will endeavour to explain to you in easy to understand language how to improve the condition of your heart and cardiovascular system.
You may have an educational interest in the subject or you may be concerned that you have not lived a particularly careful life and not ever considered the toll that it might have taken on your body, or you may already have suspicions or had minute warning signs that all is not as well as it should be.
Whatever your reasons for reading this book the information given within may help you to improve not only the present condition of your heart and cardiovascular system but also your overall health and well being.
We all know that regular exercise and a good natural diet including plenty of vegetables and fruit should keep us reasonably fit and well. But do we really know what goodness we are getting from the foodstuffs that we eat.
It has been proven that the vitamins and minerals that were present in food fifty years ago are now seriously diminished due to the massive over farming of the land that has depleted the mineral levels and goodness in the soil.
Therefore the produce grown today have only a fraction of the goodness in them that our parents and their parents benefitted from.
It has now become necessary for us to supplement our food with vitamins and minerals to avoid allowing our bodies to become deficient which can make us more prone to illness and disease.
These vitamins and minerals that are essential nutrients for promoting our good health and wellness are carried throughout the body, in our blood.
It is the function of the circulatory system to carry this oxygen and nutrient filled blood through out the body; feeding all of our organs and individual cells, on its journey picking up waste materials like carbon dioxide which it drops off in the lungs to be expelled from the body as we breathe.
Did you know that if you're over age 50 years old you will have:
A 1-in-4 chance of being struck down by a heart disaster
A 1-in-6 chance of being felled by a brain catastrophe
And a 1-in-2 chance of suffering from poor circulation
If you think I'm exaggerating, just consider that during the next 12 months in just America alone…
925,000 folks will die of heart-related calamities — that's nearly 2,500 a day!
167,000 people will tragically die due to blood clots in the brain!
I hope that you don`t think I have started on to somber a note.
Here are some more interesting facts concerning the heart and circulatory system:
The body of an adult contains nearly 100,000 miles of blood vessels! Four times the circumference of the earth.
An adult's heart pumps nearly 1,800 gallons of blood each day! That’s 657,000 gallons every year.
A human heart beats some 35 million times a year! Over an average lifetime a human heart will beat two and a half billion times.
The endothelium, the name given to the inner lining of all the blood vessels is only one cell in thickness and lumped altogether weighs as much as your liver. Stretched out, the endothelium would cover an area of about eight tennis courts.
The average three-year-old has two pints of blood in their body; the average adult at least five times more!
A "Heartbeat" is really the sound of the valves in the heart closing as they push blood through its chambers.
The heart and circulatory system is probably the most important, and the least appreciated part of the human anatomy.
Those afflicted with circulatory system disease suffer from many problems that are sometimes attributed to other areas.
Poor Leg Circulation – restricted blood flow to the legs – is most commonly caused by Peripheral Vascular Disease, or PVD.
These are disorders involving blood vessels on the outside of the heart.
PVD can involve peripheral arteries (blood vessels that carry blood away from the heart) or peripheral veins (blood vessels that carry blood toward the heart) and later result in poor circulation.
When PVD involves the arteries, it is known as Peripheral Artery Disease, or PAD.
A fatty substance called plaque builds up and hardens on the walls of the peripheral arteries, making it difficult for blood to properly flow through and thus causing poor circulation and usually high blood pressure..
The plaque can take years to build up, which is why older adults are more at risk for poor circulation.
Protecting yourself from a heart attack due to poor circulation means more than just watching your cholesterol. (Bear this in mind, half of all heart attack victims have normal cholesterol).
That's why, it is important to work hard at keeping your homocysteine levels low.
Avoiding processed food whenever you can is an excellent way of doing this.
Homocysteine is a substance that hardly anyone talks about and is produced in our bodies from eating processed foods.
Unfortunately 80% of most peoples` diet is made up of processed foods and if your homocysteine levels are too high, it eats tiny pits in your artery walls, which can become "cholesterol traps," triggering plaque formation and hardening of the arteries.
Some studies suggest that high homocysteine levels have been associated with plaque formation and are the number one contributor to heart attacks and stroke.
But the good news is that maintaining healthy homocysteine can be a breeze. A big step in the right direction is a healthy daily dose of B-6, B-12 and folic acid which has been shown to be necessary to maintain healthy homocysteine levels.
The problem is that most basic multi-vitamin tablets don't provide nearly enough B-6, B12 and folic acid. I can recommend a product called “Cardio 4 Life” and this liquid formula gives you exactly what you need in B6, B12 and folic acid to keep the homocysteine level in your blood vessels under control.