What is the Best Way to Avoid Stroke and Heart Attack?

Click Here to Find Out How You Can Completely Clean Out the Plaque Build-Up in Your Arteries

Avoid Stroke and Heart Attack - How Paleo Cause Stroke and Heart Attack

Diets seem to come and go all the time, but the paleo diet has been going from strength to strength.

Have you felt tempted to try it?

If you’ve adopted “the caveman diet” for heart health reasons, then a new study in the European Journal of Nutrition might come as a shock to you.

For those who don’t know, the paleo diet promotes foods that hunter-gatherers would have eaten more than 10,000 years ago (in the Paleolithic era—hence the name) things like fish, lean meats, vegetables, fruit, nuts, and seeds. It forbids foods like dairy products, grains, legumes, potatoes, added sugar, salt, and processed foods.

The new study—carried out by researchers from Edith Cowan University in Western Australia—investigated the effect of the paleo diet on gut health, since previous studies contradicted each other on this issue.

They recruited 47 people who had eaten a relatively healthy diet for the previous 12 months, together with 44 people who had eaten a paleo diet for at least the previous 12 months.

The paleo group was divided into a strict paleolithic group that consumed less than one serving of grains and dairy per day and a pseudo-paleolithic group that consumed more than one serving of these food groups per day.

Unsurprisingly, they found that the paleo groups were eating more fat than the other groups and that the strict paleo group consumed the most protein. They also discovered that the paleo dieters were not short of fiber, as one may have expected, given the lack of grains and legumes on their plate.

Still, that wasn’t enough to save the paleo crowd, as their blood, urine, and stool samples revealed a few unsavory truths.

Firstly, they had much more trimethylamine-n-oxide (TMAO) in their blood than the other subjects. TMAO is a compound that’s produced in our intestines, and too much of it spells bad news.

Almost all the research up to now says that it’s a major heart disease risk.

The TMAO levels were highest in the strict paleo group, the people that consumed almost no grains at all, so their heart disease risk goes way up.

So rather than Paleo, cut out this ONE ingredient (you didn’t even know you were consuming) to avoid stroke and heart attack…

Avoid Stroke and Heart Attack - The Tasty Treat that Cuts Blood Pressure and Cholesterol

Bad food tastes good. That’s part of the reason why it can be so difficult to beat conditions like high blood pressure and high cholesterol. It’s unfortunate that your cardiovascular health is not best friends with many of the sweet things in this world.

But if you do have a sweet tooth then we have some good news for you, because there is one fabulous feel good food that tastes great and can still help your health.

It can help make your heart healthier, reduce your blood pressure, cut your bad cholesterol, ramp up your brain activity and even pep up your love life.

Well, it shouldn’t be too surprising that chocolate is healthy given that it starts life as cocoa beans, which are loaded with flavanol. Flavanol is an antioxidant, one of those Swiss army knives of health that stops blood clots, boosts blood flow to the heart and brain, reduces high blood pressure, and lowers the risk of heart attack and stroke.

But it’s not the only antioxidant that cocoa beans are choc full of. There are even more of these helpful substances which are so beneficial to vascular health, and which also take the fight to free radicals—the harmful molecules which contribute to oxidation in the body.

Increased oxidation opens the way for LDL cholesterol—the bad sort—to start forming plaque on the arterial walls. As a result, they become narrower and more rigid, which is a perfect recipe for heart attack and stroke.

There are many things in the environment that can cause damage to the body, like pollution, cigarette smoke, and even too much sunlight, and antioxidants help to mop up the effects of all of them, before they can do their damage.

But it isn’t just the free radicals that help put chocolate on a par with health foods. There’s also the fat content. The majority of fat in chocolate comes from cocoa butter, which contains oleic, palmitic and stearic fatty acids (and you’ll find Oleic acid in olive oil too). It’s monounsaturated, which means it is heart-healthy and a proven blood pressure reducer.

The palmitic and stearic fatty acids are saturated fats, but still, research has found that they don’t hurt your cholesterol levels, which is odd but welcome news!

It’s now well established that chocolate can lower stress levels and improve a person’s sense of well-being and happiness. This is probably down to the fact that it’s great at boosting the production of endorphins, the brain’s natural happiness chemicals. And you also get serotonin in the mix, the body’s own antidepressant, too.

It’s worth mentioning that the brain releases these happiness chemicals when we’re in love, so when people say that they love chocolate, they really do mean it.

The only fly in the ointment with chocolate is the high sugar content. That’s why we’d recommend dark chocolate over milk chocolate every time. Choose the dark stuff with at least 65% cocoa content. Current research leads us to believe that 3 ounces (85 grams) of chocolate a day will give you all of the health benefits without the sugar rush.

Watch this video, to avoid stroke and heart attack - Strategies to Prevent Heart Attack and Stroke in the Workplace

As good as chocolate is for you, it can’t handle the job of lowering your blood pressure all on its own. For that you’re going to need something else, and these 3 simple exercises are the answer to lowering your blood pressure down to 120/80 right away…

And cholesterol control is more than chocolate can handle on its own too, so try this step-by-step approach that will get you back to healthy levels in less than a month…

Avoid Stroke and Heart Attack - Shingles Increases Your Risk of These Two Deadly Conditions

A recently published study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology shows that people at risk of shingles are also at risk of heart attacks and strokes because of the virus that causes shingles.

Shingles comes from the Herpes Zoster virus. It first causes chickenpox, usually in childhood, then it bides its time, lying dormant in your body until it shows up as shingles when you’re older.

But how does it cause stroke and heart attack?

The authors of the new study used medical data relating to South Koreans. This gave researchers extensive demographic and medical information for 570,000 people.

519,880 of them were observed between 2003 and 2013 and in that time 23,233 were diagnosed with the Herpes Zoster virus, primarily because they developed shingles.

The scientists created a comparison group with selections based on demographic and medical information.

The shingles group suffered 1.34 more strokes per 1,000 person-years than the non-shingles group did. They also suffered 0.8 heart attacks more per 1,000 person-years than the non-shingles group did.

The risk was highest for people under 40 and for those who had had shingles in the past year.

The fact that the youngest people with few cardiovascular disease risk factors experienced the highest risk was surprising, as we would usually expect older people with clogged arteries and higher blood pressure to experience strokes and heart attacks.

The authors looked at previously published studies to help them suggest why shingles might increase the risk of cardiovascular problems.

When active, the Herpes Zoster virus can replicate right next to arteries. This causes inflammation in those arteries which, in turn, can cause them to block or burst.

Even when dormant, the virus is constantly reactivated at a level that causes no symptoms. When this occurs next to arteries, the same thing happens.

The virus tends to move through your nervous system to the center of your body, where you have the largest arteries.

The virus increases both your blood pressure and negative emotions.

The virus compromises your immune system, which then puts you at risk of medical problems, including cardiovascular ones.

This all points to why we should live healthy lifestyles. Being healthy is the best way to be ensure that your immune system is strong enough to resist the shingles virus. It tends to attack people who are older with weaker immune systems, so the healthier and stronger we can keep ourselves, the better we can resist it.

Watch this video, to avoid stroke and heart attack - Does aspirin help prevent stroke and heart attacks? - Mayo Clinic Radio

If you have high cholesterol, learn how to eliminate it by cutting out the one ingredient explained here (maybe it helps with shingles too)…

This post is from the Oxidized Cholesterol Strategy Program. It was created by Scott Davis. Because he once suffered from high cholesterol, so much so that he even had a severe heart attack. This is what essentially led him to finding healthier alternatives to conventional medication. Oxidized Cholesterol Strategy is a unique online program that provides you with all the information you need to regain control of your cholesterol levels and health, as a whole.

To find out more about this program, go to Avoid Stroke and Heart Attack.