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Improve Cholesterol and Heart Health – One Coffee Type Prevents Heart Attack—Another Causes It
Studies on coffee consumption and cardiovascular health are very contradictory.
Some studies show extreme benefits of coffee while others show extreme dangers of heart attack and stroke.
So, a team of Norwegian researchers decided to research whether the way we brew our coffee might be what makes a difference.
Indeed, one type of coffee brewing was found to significantly decrease risk of heart attack while another type increased the risk.
From 1985 onwards, the research team recruited a large sample of 508,747 healthy Norwegian adults that was roughly representative of the population regarding age, race, gender, and so on.
They observed these participants for an average of 20 years and were interested to see who would die of cardiovascular disease, stroke and heart attacks.
During this period, the team also asked the subjects about their coffee drinking habits and brewing methods and recorded changes, if any.
During the 20 years of follow-up, 46,341 participants died, including 12,621 from cardiovascular disease.
Of these cardiovascular disease deaths, 6,202 were caused by heart attacks, and 2,894 were caused by strokes.
Compared with those who drank no coffee at all, those who drank filtered coffee were 15 percent less likely to die prematurely of any cause. Men were 12 percent and women were 20 percent less likely to die of cardiovascular disease.
Unfiltered coffee was a different matter, though, and no healthier than abstaining from coffee altogether for younger adults and causing deaths of any cause, deaths of cardiovascular disease, and deaths of heart attacks for those over the age of 60.
So why is filtered coffee healthier for our hearts than unfiltered coffee?
From the available literature, the researchers concluded that the culprits were the chemical substances in the coffee grounds and oils that remained in the coffee if it was unfiltered. These chemicals cause high cholesterol and, thus, cardiovascular disease and early death.
Using the study as a guide for coffee brewing, it means that you should stay away from Turkish coffee, which is yummy but unfiltered. Any other finely ground coffees in which the grains remain unfiltered at the bottom of your cup while you drink the liquid from the top are equally unhealthy.
A French press or any other plunger device that uses a meshed metal screen at the bottom of the plunger is not good enough to qualify as a filtering device either, as it can’t thoroughly filter out the oils from the coffee beans.
The best filters were found to be percolators with paper or fabric filters.
Improve Cholesterol and Heart Health – But coffee habits don’t make or break your risk of heart attack. In fact, there’s another ingredient that you must cut out, one that you didn’t even know you were consuming. I’ll explain this here…
Improve Cholesterol and Heart Health – This Cholesterol Combats Alzheimer’s
An excess of cholesterol wreaks havoc in our blood vessels, and researchers have now discovered it causes Alzheimer’s disease as well.
Canadian researchers examined the brains of patients who had died of Alzheimer’s disease, finding that Alzheimer’s brains contained significantly more cholesterol than non-Alzheimer’s brains.
But that’s only half the story… They also discovered that Alzheimer’s brains and healthy brains do very different things with cholesterol.
And this may hold the key to finally cure Alzheimer’s.
The Canadian team found that Alzheimer’s brains retained cholesterol while healthy brains metabolized it. This study appeared in the journal Neurobiology of Disease.
A few years later, a different team published a study in Molecular Neurodegeneration in which they actually demonstrated what happened to neurons when they loaded cholesterol into their membranes.
These neurons immediately started resembling and behaving like neurons in Alzheimer’s brains.
Compared to non-Alzheimer’s neurons, Different genes were turned on and off, the transport of proteins in those neurons were blocked, and they secreted a lot more amyloid-beta42, a protein that appears in large amounts in Alzheimer’s brains.
But at present researchers still don’t understand the exact role that cholesterol plays in the development of the disease.
Until exact cause and effect relationships can be proven, it’s best to drop cholesterol to healthy levels.
Improve Cholesterol and Heart Health – The Best Diet to Lower Bad Cholesterol
Hundreds of diets all claim to be the best at weight loss, cardiovascular health, and other health benefits.
But which diet works the best?
A study just published in the journal BMJ has answered this question.
There were many candidates for this short-term gain, but only ONE winner for long-term weight loss and cardiovascular health benefit.
A large multinational team of researchers reviewed 121 studies with about 22,000 participants.
In these studies, the subjects were divided into a group that followed a diet and a group that continued to eat normally. They all compared these groups based on weight and cardiovascular health factors.
In general, the diets were divided into low-fat, low-carbohydrate, and moderate macronutrient diets.
The macronutrient diet contained more vegetables, fruits, and legumes than our current diet as well as less fat and carbohydrates.
The team also looked at various popular diets, like Atkins (keto type), Mediterranean, DASH, and Zone.
Within six months of commencing the diets, all participants showed slight weight reduction and improvement in cardiovascular health.
Regarding weight loss, low-fat and low-carbohydrate diets led to a loss of between four and five kilograms (or 8.8 and 11 pounds) over the six-month period.
Moderate macronutrient diets were less effective.
Low-fat and low-carbohydrate diets were also approximately equally effective at reducing both systolic (5 mmHg) and diastolic (3 mmHg) blood pressure by six months.
Moderate macronutrient diets were less effective here too.
Low-fat and moderate macronutrient diets were the best at reducing bad LDL cholesterol, and low-carbohydrate diets were the best at increasing good HDL cholesterol—but again, only at six months.
Atkins, DASH, and Zone were approximately equally effective at reducing weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol by six months.
By 12 months, however, the picture looked quite different. By then, the cardiovascular effects and weight loss benefits of all these diets but one had disappeared.
Only the Mediterranean diet maintained its positive effects on cardiovascular health by 12 months. The largest of these effects was on cholesterol reduction.
There are three things to learn from this study.
First, our normal diet is so unhealthy that any other diet can have positive effects—in the short term, at least.
Second, if weight loss is your priority, then Atkins, DASH, and Zone are your best bets in the short term. However, if heart health is more important—which it should be—then the Mediterranean diet is the only one that maintains its positive health effects in the long term.
Third, dieting alone is not a terribly effective weight loss tool, which is why it is better to combine it with other positive lifestyle changes, like regular exercise, stress reduction, and adequate sleep.
For more ideas to improve cholesterol and heart health, watch this video –These Foods Clean Your Arteries & Can Prevent A Heart Attack
But if you want your cholesterol under control, you actually only have to cut out this ONE ingredient you didn’t even know you were consuming ….
And to drop your blood pressure below 120/80—starting today—do this simple exercise for 9 minutes ….
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 Improve Cholesterol and Heart Health.
