A Healthy Heart

Interactive Transcript

spk_0 Have you ever wondered if there are more natural ways to lower your high blood pressure?

spk_0 Guard again, stall timers, lose weight, feel better.

spk_0 Well, it turns out there is.

spk_0 Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast.

spk_0 I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger.

spk_0 Today, we learned a little bit more about how to keep our heart healthy and we start with

spk_0 ways to improve our heart rate variability.

spk_0 Everyone feel for your pulse.

spk_0 Hold out your hand, thumb up, and feel for the naby bone at the top of your wrist.

spk_0 Okay, now, slide your hand down across the front of your wrist.

spk_0 Feel those like strands of spaghetti.

spk_0 Those are the tendons in your wrist.

spk_0 If you press lightly between the naby bone and that first tendon, you should feel your pulse.

spk_0 Got it?

spk_0 Okay, now what we're going to do is feel what happens to our pulse when we take a deep breath.

spk_0 We're going to try it twice.

spk_0 Try to feel what happens to your pulse when you inhale and when you exhale.

spk_0 All right, here we go.

spk_0 Slow inhale.

spk_0 Slow exhale.

spk_0 One more time.

spk_0 In.

spk_0 Out.

spk_0 What happened when you breathed in and breathed out?

spk_0 You should have felt your pulse beat up when you inhaled and slowed down when you exhale.

spk_0 That's called heart rate variability.

spk_0 A measure of the control our vagus nerve has over our heart and it's a good thing.

spk_0 Healthy heart is not a metronome.

spk_0 Low heart rate variability predicts greater risk of heart disease and death from several causes.

spk_0 High risk patients with low variability and heart rate have twice the risk of dying prematurely.

spk_0 Is there anything we can do to positively impact heart rate variability?

spk_0 Volunteer slow breathing at about six breaths per minute has a technique that's been used for thousands of years

spk_0 in an essential part of many meditative and relaxation practices.

spk_0 It can benefit several heart rate variability parameters offering a low-tech, low-cost technique.

spk_0 Speaking of low-tech, low-cost, what about exercise?

spk_0 Aerobic training, at least twice a week, positively influences heart nerve control.

spk_0 What about what we eat?

spk_0 Those eating plant-based diets are better overall heart rate variability, vegetarians, for example.

spk_0 Don't tend to have only better blood pressures, cholesterol, triglycerides, and blood sugars.

spk_0 They also have better heart rate variability.

spk_0 The vagus nerve toning effects of plant-based diets may help explain part of their cardio protective effect.

spk_0 Any plants in particular, while no significant association was seen between heart rate variability measures

spk_0 and the intake of fruits and vegetables in general, the consumption of green leafy vegetables

spk_0 seems to stand out, perhaps helping to explain why eating just a half serving of greens a day may cut a risk of having a heart attack by up to 67%.

spk_0 So boost nerve control to your heart by any greens necessary.

spk_0 And the next story, how not to die from heart disease?

spk_0 The most likely reason most of our loved ones will die is heart disease.

spk_0 It's still up to each of us to make our own decisions as to what to eat and how to live, but we should make these choices consciously educating ourselves about the predictable consequences of our actions.

spk_0 Atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries begins in childhood.

spk_0 By age 10, the arteries are nearly all kids raised on the stand American diet, already have fatty streaks, the first stage of the disease.

spk_0 Then the plaque start forming in our 20s, get worse in our 30s, and then start killing us off.

spk_0 In our heart it's called heart attack and our brain can manifest as a stroke.

spk_0 Then the choices and whether or not to eat healthy to prevent heart disease is whether or not you want to reverse the heart disease you likely already have.

spk_0 Is that even possible?

spk_0 When researchers took people with heart disease and put them on the kind of plant based diet followed by papillais that did not get epidemic heart disease, their hope was that it might slow the disease process down maybe even stopping.

spk_0 But instead something miraculous happened.

spk_0 The disease started to reverse to get better.

spk_0 As soon as patients stopped eating artery clogging dies their bodies were able to start dissolving some of the plaque away, opening up arteries without drugs without surgery, suggesting their bodies won't heal all along but were just never given the chance.

spk_0 Let me share with you what's been called the best kept secret in medicine.

spk_0 The best kept secret in medicine is that sometimes given the right conditions the body can heal itself.

spk_0 You know if you whack your shin really hard on a coffee table you can get all red hot painful swollen inflamed butt will heal naturally to just stand back and let your body work its magic.

spk_0 But one of you kept whacking your shin in the same place day after day.

spk_0 In fact three times a day breakfast lunch and dinner.

spk_0 It never heal you go to your doctor be like oh my shin hurts it like no problem whip out their pad where your prescription for pain killers you're still whacking your shin three times day

spk_0 Oh it still really hurts like heck but all feels so much better with those pain pills on board.

spk_0 Thank heavens for modern medicine.

spk_0 It's like when people take nitroglycerin for crushing chest pain tremendous relief may not do anything to treat the underlying cause.

spk_0 Our body wants to come back to health if we let it before we keep re damaging ourselves three times a day we may never heal.

spk_0 One of the most amazing things I learned in all my medical training was that when about 15 years of stopping smoking your lung cancer risk approaches that of a lifelong non smoker.

spk_0 Is that amazing like your lungs can clear out all that torrent eventually it's almost as if you never started smoking at all and every morning of our smoking life that healing process start into wham our first cigarette of the day re-enjuring our lungs with every puff just like we can re-enjure our arteries with every bite.

spk_0 When all we had to do all along the miracle cure is just stand back get out of the way stop re-damaging ourselves and let our bodies natural healing process these bring us back towards health.

spk_0 The human body is a self healing machine sure you could choose moderation hit yourself with a smaller hammer but why beat yourself up at all.

spk_0 I don't tell my smoking patients to cut down a half pack a day I tell them to quit sure half pack is better than two packs a day but we should try to only put healthy things in our mouths.

spk_0 We've known about this for decades American Heart Journal 1977 cases like Mr. FW your heart disease so bad couldn't even make it to the mailbox.

spk_0 Mr. Editing Health here and a few months later was climbing mountains no bang plant based diets aren't just safer and cheaper they can work better because you're treating the actual cause of the disease.

spk_0 Finally today when doctors fail to disclose dietary treatment options from cardiac patients they are violating the cornerstone of medical ethics informed consent.

spk_0 When he was a surgeon as a Cleveland clinic Dr. Caldwell us all stand published a controversial paper in the American Journal of Cardiology.

spk_0 Heart bypass operations carry significant risks including the potential to cause further heart damage stroke brain dysfunction.

spk_0 Angioplasty isn't much better also carrying significant mortality and morbidity and often doesn't work in terms of decreasing risk of subsequent heart attack or death.

spk_0 So it seems we have enormous paradox the disease is the leading killer of men and women in western society western civilization largely untreated.

spk_0 The benefits of the invasive procedures are best temporary with most patients eventually succumbing to their disease.

spk_0 In cancer we call that palliative care.

spk_0 I would just kind of throw up our hands throwing the towel and give up actually trying to treat the disease.

spk_0 So why does this juggernaut of invasive procedures persist? Well one reason is that performing surgical interventions has the potential for enormous financial reward.

spk_0 That's considered one of the barriers to the practice of preventive cardiology adequate return.

spk_0 Diet and lifestyle interventions loses money for the physician.

spk_0 Although the practice of preventive cardiology is not as lucrative this article was hoping to nudge cardiologists in that direction by appealing to less tangible benefits.

spk_0 Another barrier is doctors don't think patients want it. Physician surveys show that doctors often don't even bring up diet and lifestyle options.

spk_0 Assuming the patients would prefer for example to be on cholesterol lowering drugs every day for the rest of their lives.

spk_0 That may be true for some but it's up to the patient to decide.

spk_0 According to the official AMA code of medical ethics physicians are supposed to disclose all relevant medical information to patients.

spk_0 The patient's right to self-decision can be effectively exercised only if a patient possesses enough information to enable and inform choice.

spk_0 The physician's obligation is to present the medical facts accurately to the patient.

spk_0 For example before starting someone at moderate risk on a cholesterol lowering statin drug, a physician might ideally say something like,

spk_0 you should know that for folks in your situation the number of individuals who must be treated with a statin to prevent one death from cardiovascular events such as a heart attack or stroke is generally between a 1600 which means if I treated 60 people in your position one might benefit and 59 would not.

spk_0 As these numbers show it's important for you to know that most of the people who take a statin will not benefit from doing so and moreover that statins can have side effects such as muscle pain, liver damage, upsets stomach.

spk_0 Even in people who do not benefit from the medication, I'm giving you this information so you can weigh the risks and benefits of drugs versus diet and then make an informed decision.

spk_0 How many physicians have these kinds of frank and open discussions with their patients?

spk_0 Non-disclosure of medical information by doctors that kind of paternalism is supposed to be a thing of the past.

spk_0 Now physicians are supposed to honor informed consent unless the patients in a coma or something or it's an emergency but too many physicians continue to treat their patients as if they were unconscious.

spk_0 At the end of this long roundtable discussion on angioplasty and stents, the Eddoran chief of the American Journal of Cardiology reminded the participants of an important fact to place it all in context.

spk_0 Anthroschlerosis is due to high cholesterol which is due to poor dietary choices and so if we all existed on a plant-based diet, we would not have even needed this discussion.

spk_0 Visit NutritionFacts.org slash audio to see all the podcast episodes with descriptions that include links to their associated videos, sources cited and other details are available on each video's page.

spk_0 Information about my books, how not to die, how not to die, how not to age, is that NutritionFacts.org slash books, all proceeds from book sales go to charity and sign up for our free newsletter at NutritionFacts.org.

spk_0 If you're a work slash subscriber, just stay updated on the latest bite-sized videos and articles. NutritionFacts.org is a science-based nonprofit and everything on the website is free. There are no ads, no corporate sponsorships, no kickbacks, strictly non-commercial, not selling anything just put it up as a public service, as the labor of love as a tribute to my grandmother whose own life was saved with evidence-based nutrition. Thanks for listening.

A Healthy Heart

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