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Cutting
Down Your Cholesterol Level - Sitting and Heart Health
There
are lots of good reasons to sit down these days, and unfortunately for our
hearts one of them is good television. There’s just so much of it!
But
if you’re also sitting for hours at a desk job too then you’re getting a double
dose of badness.
Sitting
down for too long has been shown by many studies to be bad for your heart health, but the latest one on the
subject now reveals that one of these reasons to sit is worse for you than the
other.
The
new study appears in the Journal of the American Heart Association and it was
authored by researchers from the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons at
Columbia University in New York City.
They
were curious about how sitting affects our hearts. Were couch potatoes going to
have more heart problems than desk jockeys at work or
fewer?
Luckily,
they didn’t have to set up a study of their own because the information they
were after was already available.
The
Jackson Heart Study had previously looked at a whole host of health issues in
3,592 African American people from Jackson, Mississippi.
Participants
had filled in questionnaires that told researchers about how much or how little
physical activity they generally did.
As
part of this they kept a record of their television viewing time, and also time
spent sitting at work, two figures which were gold for the present researchers.
They
were able to divide the television viewers into five groups, on a scale that
went from least to most time spent watching. Some people watched less than one
hour per week while at the other extreme some of them watched more than four
hours every day.
The
researchers also did the same for the workers. They divided them into those who
said that they sat down “never”, “seldom”, “sometimes”, “often”, or “always”.
Their
physical activity was measured in terms of how much exercise they got each week
and how intense it was.
It’s
worth noting that the study didn’t just take a snapshot. It ran for 8.5 years,
so we can be pretty sure that all the data gathered is a true representation of
these people’s behavior.
The
findings were interesting. People who sat watching television for four or more
hours per day had a 49 percent higher risk of cardiovascular disease and early death
than folks who watched for two or fewer hours per day. So, no big surprise
there then.
What
did come as a surprise was that the people who sat at work showed quite
different results. Those who reported that they sat “always” or “often” at work
were no more likely to have cardiovascular problems or die prematurely than
those were who reported “never” sitting at work or “seldom” sitting.
So
why was sitting down to watch TV worse for their health than sitting down at
work? The thinking is that television watchers might be more likely to sit for
long periods without being interrupted, while some desk workers may get more
opportunities to move around, like when they visit a co-worker or fetch files,
for example.
It’s
also more likely that television watchers will eat a big meal before they sit
down and once they’ve put their feet up the potato chips and other unhealthy
snacks often come out too.
That’s
not something that office workers would generally be doing, so perhaps the food
component helps to explain why there wasn’t any variation in consequences
between the different frequencies of workplace sitting.
Not
all sit-down jobs are healthy, of course. Truck drivers can’t move around and
may end up eating more than they should just to relieve the boredom of the
road.
But
the good news from the study is that moderate or vigorous physical activity for
150 minutes per week eliminated the heart disease risk for everyone.
Even the people who watched television for four or more hours per week cut
their chances of heart trouble to zero if they also exercised for those three
and a half hours a week.
The
chief takeaway from this is that moderate or vigorous exercise can take away a
lot of the health risks from your next box set binge.
Cutting
Down Your Cholesterol Level - 3 Powerful Foods That Dissolve Blood Clots
Drug
companies have come up with a whole host of medications meant to dissolve blood clots, because it’s one of
the major keys to preventing heart attacks and strokes.
These
blood thinners are often advertised as life-enhancing, but the side-effects
they come with can be the exact opposite.
Pharmaceutical
corporations will always try their best, but they can’t really compete with
nature, whose laboratory has been perfecting cheap, safe, and effective blood
thinners for millions of years.
The
three best natural alternatives to dangerous drugs can thin your blood and
dissolve clots. We know that they work and we know that they don’t have side-effects
because they’ve been used all over the world for centuries.
Apple-
it turns out that the saying is true – one a day really does keep the doctor
away, or at least clots away, because there’s a compound found only in
apples which fights their formation. It’s called quercetin-3-rutinoside, or
rutin for short, and clinical studies have shown that it stops the formation of
fibrinogen, which helps to form fibrin, and fibrin helps to form clots.
Mice
studies have also suggested that rutin can combat thrombosis too, which is good
news for those at risk of deep vein thrombosis, where blood clots form in the
lower leg. If the clots break free and reach the lungs, they can cause a
potentially deadly pulmonary thrombosis, so make sure you’re adding apples to
your weekly grocery list.
Papaya
and pineapple- These
tropical fruits contain protein-digesting enzyme called bromelain. It’s great
at reducing high blood pressure, lowering bad cholesterol, and combating inflammation. It’s a good clot
buster too because it attacks the fibrin in blood clots with fibrin’s natural
enemy, a substance called plasmin. Bromelain stimulates plasmin production, and
it also helps stop platelets from sticking together, although it’s not known
why yet.
Natto- this fermented
soybean derivative puts a lot of people off. It’s gooey stuff that packs a
punch with its strong odor, but generations of Japanese have relied on it in
their cooking. But it’s a good thing they have because it contains nattokinase,
an enzyme that dissolves existing clots and prevents new ones from getting
started. This alone should convince you to give noxious Natto a second chance.
Cutting
Down Your Cholesterol Level - Drink This Juice to Lower Cholesterol
Many
studies agree that this juice is fabulous stuff.
The
science says it bestows such great cardiovascular benefits because it’s packed
with carotenoids, calcium, and it also delivers a thunderbolt’s worth of
vitamin A.
Tomato
juice is great at reducing both cholesterol and blood pressure, so researchers wanted to
test how great.
Researchers
recruited 184 men and 297 women. A few suffered from high cholesterol and 94
had hypertension or pre-hypertension. Their
average ages were 56.3 and 58.4 years respectively.
For
a year, these participants were given as much unsalted tomato juice to drink as
they wanted, but it doesn’t look like they were exactly clamoring for the
stuff, because the average participant only got through about one cup a day.
But
maybe they should have been guzzling it, because after one year of chugging
tomato juice, their systolic blood pressure had dropped from 141.2 to
137.0 mmHg (millimeters of mercury) and their diastolic pressure from 83.3 to
80.9 mmHg. Those are averages, so they don’t show the even better news – that
the people who started out with the highest blood pressure saw the biggest
reductions.
125
of the participants had high cholesterol or high blood fats. Their
LDL cholesterol, which is the bad stuff
that poses the greatest heart disease risk, dropped from 155 to
149.9 mg/dl (milligrams per deciliter).
You
might be thinking that these reductions don’t seem very impressive, but they
are when you remember what caused them: drinking just one cup of tomato juice
every day.
Also,
they didn’t find any reduction in blood glucose, nor changes in HDL cholesterol (the good type) and
triglycerides (blood fats), so it seems the effects were limited to reducing bad cholesterol.
To
be sure that tomato juice alone was the cause of their dramatic drop, the
scientists had them fill out a questionnaire at the beginning and end of the
study to make sure that nothing else about their lifestyles could have affected
the outcome, so we know that the results are watertight.
This
was the second time that this research team had looked at the effects of tomato
juice. They also performed a 2015 study to see tomato juice might affect
menopausal symptoms in middle-aged women, and they also happened to test their
cholesterol as part of that.
In
this one, they asked their 93 subjects to drink 200ml of tomato juice twice a
day for eight weeks. This is a bit less than two cups per day.
Afterwards,
22 of the women with high triglycerides saw them drop substantially, and the
ones with the highest scores at the start enjoyed the biggest falls.
Before
you get too excited, the one big limitation in this study is that they didn’t
gather enough detailed information about what the participants ate. This means
we can’t know if the tomato juice was used to replace something unhealthy. If
it replaced something sugary then that change alone might have been responsible
for the health benefits, and not the tomato juice itself, but let’s not forget
that the results are consistent with other studies, so it’s probably safe to
assume that tomato juice really is that good for you!
For more ideas in cutting down your
cholesterol level, watch this video - What is the BEST DRINK to LOWER CHOLESTEROL? LOWER Your CHOLESTEROL NATURALLY By Drink this DRINK!
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.
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