4 Ways To Avoid A Heart Attack

One minute you are enjoying a stroll in the park and the next you feel as if an elephant just stepped on you. Clutching your chest and violently gasping for air, you suffer the eventual outcome of heart disease: a premature heart attack. This can be stopped.

The underlying cause of a heart attack is narrowing of the arteries. The process is known medically as atherosclerosis. Cardiologists often describe atherosclerosis as a plumbing problem: fat and cholesterol-laden gunk gradually builds up within the arteries. If this build-up grows thick enough, it eventually plugs an affected "pipe” and you die. In 2004, Time magazine told the world that there's just one problem with the cholesterol hypothesis: “Sometimes it's dead wrong.”

More than half of the people who suffer from heart attacks have “low cholesterol.” And “high” cholesterol (300-350mg/dL) is a natural and healthy part of aging. The higher total blood cholesterol the longer (yes, longer) people live. Thus, if you want to avoid feeling like an elephant is crushing your chest, look beyond cholesterol.

Coronary arteries bear little resemblance to pipes. Instead, they are made up of muscle sandwiched between two “structural” layers. When the muscle of arteries becomes inflamed “atherosclerosis” or heart disease can set in. This is initiated by damage to the innermost structural layer that faces the bloodstream. Science has made great strides in identifying what causes damage to this layer.

Aside from smoking, the biggest culprit in today’s heart attack pandemic is high blood sugar (greater than 115). It leads to a condition known as insulin resistance or early Type-II diabetes. Suicide in slow motion, insulin resistance causes blood sugar to float in the blood longer than it should. Resistant to insulin, muscle no longer vacuums it from the bloodstream. Over time, blood sugar reacts with amino acids floating nearby. The product of this reaction is a Swiss Army knife termed advance glycated end (AGE) product.

AGE products cut and stab deep into structural layers of coronary arteries.[1] Medically, this is termed glycation. The slicing and dicing explains why diabetics have four times the risk of heart attack relative to non-diabetics. Overcome with high blood sugar, they face the butchering process of AGE products. The surprise outcome is a premature heart attack.

A wildly effective way to prevent the indiscriminant damage caused by AGE products is to control blood sugar or increase sensitivity to insulin. Aside from cinnamon, proper sunshine and green tea, other methods of controlling it have been discovered:

1. Interval training can lower blood sugar by up to 40%.[2] To put into perspective, commonly prescribed Metformin lowers blood by a paltry 19% while putting users at risk of obesity![3]

2. Nutritional supplementation with magnesium (400 mg/day) was found to improve high blood sugar among elderly individuals.[4] A magnesium deficiency inhibits insulin from escorting glucose out of the bloodstream into muscles. The end result is insulin resistance and an increased risk of heart attack. Magnesium aspartate is the best absorbed form of magnesium.

3. Tannic acid from the banaba leaf mimics the actions of insulin by eliciting glucose transport from the blood stream into muscle. The safe and effective blood-sugar lowering effect of tannic acid has caught the attention of Big Pharma. Many drug companies are working rigorously to create a synthetic knock-off.

4. Increasing fiber intake with a tablespoon of psyllium husk prevents dangerous spikes in blood sugar after a meal.

Controlling blood sugar has become the absolute hottest area of research. Not only does it suggest a single way of ameliorating heart disease, but also a host of other diseases caused by high blood sugar. These include but are not limited to diabetes, cancer and even Alzheimer’s! Instead of dosing patients up with a handful of drugs to treat a handful of diseases, controlling blood sugar naturally is one remedy for all three!