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Click Here to Find Out How You Can Completely Clean Out the Plaque Build-Up in Your Arteries |
Keep Your Bad
Cholesterol Level Low - Turn Back the Clock on Your Ageing Heart
Want
to live forever?
Scientists
have taken one step closer to achieving this dream after finding a secret
protein that keeps cardiac muscle youthful.
And
it may be the key to keeping heart attacks and stroke at bay for good.
Cell
magazine published a Harvard study which involved joining the circulatory
systems of 2 animals. When they connected old mice with young mice, the older
heart tissue got a surprising boost from the young.
The
question was how did it work? Researchers isolated a molecule in the blood of
the young mice that wasn’t there in the blood of the older ones. It’s called
growth differentiating factor-11 (GDF-11) and it’s full of promise.
And
it gets better…
Not
content with just finding it, the researchers managed to replicate it too.
Which is great news, because as we age, there’s less of this molecule present
in the blood. Cardiac muscle tissue starts to grow stiff and becomes thicker
without it, which is the cause of heart disease.
Because
scientists can reproduce this molecule, there’s now hope that we might one day
be able to effectively treat heart disease, and with something natural too, not some
pharmaceutical substance that might cause side effects.
Until
that day comes, though, the best thing to do is preserve what you’ve got! And
the two best ways to do this are by controlling high blood pressure and reducing excess cholesterol.
Keep Your Bad
Cholesterol Level Low - Common Drug Raises Cardiovascular Disease Risk 32%
Antibiotics have saved countless
lives since Alexander Fleming first discovered penicillin in 1928.
But
overuse has led to worries about bacteria becoming resistant to these commonly
prescribed drugs.
That’s
common knowledge of course, but what isn’t is the other potentially devastating
health effects of their overuse. A new American study published in the European
Heart Journal now suggests that too many courses of antibiotics are a red flag
for greater heart attack risks.
Researchers
analyzed the information of 36,429 women collected by the Nurse’s Health Study
between 2004 and 2012. The participants were at least 60 years old in 2004 and
they completed a health questionnaire every two years until 2012.
They
were asked about their antibiotic use throughout their adult lives, between the
ages of 20 and 39, between 40 and 59, and over 60 years of age.
They
were divided into four groups based on their antibiotic use: those who had
never taken any, those who had taken courses of 15 days or less, those who had
taken courses of 15 to 60 days, and those who had taken courses longer than two
months.
The
scientists discovered that those who had taken antibiotics for two months or
more when they were 60 and older had a 32 percent greater chance of developing cardiovascular disease compared to if they’d never taken any.
The
women aged 40 to 59 who had taken at least one two-month course increased their
risk of cardiovascular disease by 28 percent. Women below the age of 40 suffered no
cardiovascular effects from these drugs.
It’s
common when you hear about studies like this to wonder about other factors that
might have affected the results, but the scientists were careful to account for
smoking, diet, obesity, co-occurring health conditions, other medications, and
so forth. In the end, they were sure that they were witnessing the effects of
the antibiotics.
This
is alarming if you’re older because you’re more likely to take antibiotics than
younger people, but why should that be?
The
authors offered two reasons to explain why antibiotics can have this effect.
Firstly,
antibiotics destroy all bacteria, good and bad, which is bad news for the good
bacteria in our intestines, the ones that help our bodies to fight off
precisely those bacterial infections that then require us to take more
antibiotics.
Secondly,
good intestinal bacteria seem to have the ability to prevent inflammation, which is inextricably linked with cardiovascular disease. So, antibiotics deliver a double blow to older people.
The
same authors presented a related study at the American Heart Association’s
Epidemiology and Lifestyle conference in New Orleans in 2018.
From
the same data, they found that women who had taken antibiotics from age 40 or
over were 19 percent more likely to die of any disease later, and 57 percent
were more likely to die of cardiovascular disease later when compared with their peers who had not taken any.
Keep Your Bad
Cholesterol Level Low - How Cholesterol Causes Strokes and Heart Attacks
Our
immune systems are supposed to keep us healthy, but occasionally they do their
jobs a little too well…well enough to kill us, in fact.
You
can read about one example of this in a new study by German scientists, in the
journal, Nature. They’ve been looking at the process that forms cholesterol plaques in arteries, and how they break up to cause heart attacks and strokes.
For
those who don’t know: when cholesterol
sticks to your arterial walls, it poses a danger to your health.
Your
arteries are flexible hosepipes that transport oxygen-rich blood around your
body, and when cholesterol
plaques form inside them those hosepipes get narrower—so your heart has to pump
harder to get the blood through—and they also damage your arterial walls by
hardening them.
And
worse still, when those cholesterol
plaques break off from your arterial walls the pieces can end up anywhere. They
can get swept into the heart and block its blood supply, so you have a heart attack, or travel to your brain, giving you a stroke. And if the
blood supply to your legs gets blocked by plaque debris then you might end up
with gangrene and need to have them amputated.
With
all those horrible consequences in mind, the German scientists behind this
study were keen to understand why the plaques break up so they could find a way
to stop it.
They
discovered that when a cholesterol
plaque starts to form somewhere, the immune system realizes something is wrong
and sends in the cavalry, which in this case is white blood cells called
neutrophils.
Neutrophils
use inflammation to kill foreign invaders like viruses and bacteria, and they
do the same for cholesterol plaques, too.
But
cholesterol plaques are tenacious beasts. They embed themselves in your
arterial walls, so, unfortunately, when the neutrophils attack them with
inflammation, the smooth muscle cells inside these walls are also damaged.
And
actually, the smooth muscle cells are damaged anyway by the toxic proteins
released by the cholesterol plaques. These smooth muscle cells do their best to
keep the plaques in place, preventing them from breaking off and causing things
like heart attacks, but they end up being attacked from both sides, by the
plaques and by the neutrophils that are trying to help.
So,
as you can see, the body just isn’t capable of combating cholesterol plaques.
When they attach to the walls of your arteries they damage them, and when your
immune system tries to help, it causes even more damage.
So,
the only sure way to help avoid all of this destruction is to make sure your
liver can do its job of removing cholesterol in the first place before plaques
can form.
For
more ideas to keep your bad cholesterol level low, watch this video - How to Raise Your HDL & Lower Your Triglycerides (NOT what you Think)
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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