When it comes to having a healthy heart, it’s important to know your numbers. Even if you’re in your 20s or 30s, you’re not “too young” to start making heart-healthy food and lifestyle choices. Two of my friends who wrestled with heart disease experienced two different outcomes. One—a hard-driving 37-year-old tech entrepreneur, who was motivated to change his diet and a few bad habits after his heart attack—survived. The other, a talented 46-year-old photographer, who lived and ate on-the-run—working long hours and sleeping too little—unexpectedly died of a cardiac arrest during a conference he was attending.

In heart disease research, younger groups (between ages 25-55) have historically been considered “low risk”. This may be changing. In a 2015 study published last year in Circulation, researchers tracked heart disease death rates among adults aged 25 years and older. Between 1979 and 2011, heart disease deaths fell dramatically among those over age 65. However, there was considerably less improvement in heart disease death rates among those under age 55, especially for women—attributed to increasing rates of diabetes and obesity in younger adults, as well as non-traditional risk factors, such as stress and depression, common among young women with early-onset heart disease.
 

Symptoms of inflammation (and why it matters)

 
The sooner you get familiar with your numbers, the greater your success in lowering—even reversing—your risk for heart disease, as well as other chronic conditions and diseases.
The most relevant numbers are markers of inflammation.

Why? Inflammation is your body’s response to stress—whether from your diet, lifestyle or environment. Think of what happens when you sprain your ankle or burn your hand: you experience immediate pain, swelling and redness.

This kind of acute inflammation is good, but our modern, convenience-oriented lifestyle contributes to an epidemic of chronic, low-grade inflammation that most of us experience in the form of skin disorders (rashes, “adult acne”, eczema, psoriasis), joint aches and pains, chronic headaches, digestive distress, IBS, allergies, or fatigue—our body’s way of communicating with us that things are out of balance.When your body’s systems experience a constant inflammatory response, you are more susceptible to accelerated aging (internally and externally) and chronic diseases and conditions, including heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, obesity and arthritis.

One of the main factors contributing to chronic low-grade inflammation are the foods that we eat. Typical culprits include sugar, junk food / processed / fast foods, gluten, grains and dairy.
 

Markers of Inflammation:  Know your numbers!

 
You will also want to get familiar with other markers of inflammation (see list below).

High Sensitivity C-Reactive Protein (hs-CRP). Your level of CRP increases in response to inflammation. Higher levels of CRP are linked with greater risk of heart attack. Ideally, your hs-CRP is <1.0 mg/L (low risk for developing cardiovascular disease). An hs-CRP level of >3.0 indicates high risk for heart disease. *Note: “Normal” values may vary slightly among different labs.

Vitamin D (25-hydroxy vitamin D). Recent studies link low levels of vitamin D to an increased risk of heart disease. Optimal vitamin D levels are between 50-70 ng/ml. In cases of cancer or heart disease, the recommended level is even higher: 70-100 ng/ml.

Hemoglobin A1c. If you have a family history of diabetes, heart disease or overweight / obesity this is an important number to know. This is a blood test that reflects your average blood sugar level for the past 2-3 months. Optimal is <5.7% (low risk of diabetes). An A1c of 6.5% or higher indicates diabetes.

Homocysteine. At high levels, homocysteine, an amino acid, can damage the lining of the arteries and promote blood clotting, raising your risk for heart disease, heart attacks, blood clots and strokes. Ideally, your homocysteine levels are below 15 mmol/L. Above 15mmol/L is considered “high”.
 

Metabolic Syndrome

 
This is a group of risk factors that raises your risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Three (3) or more of these risk factors (listed below) = metabolic syndrome = increased risk of heart disease.

1. Large waist size. This indicates excess body fat around the waist.
–For men: 40 inches or larger
–For women: 35 inches or larger

2. High triglycerides.
Your triglycerides are 150 mg/dL or higher OR You are using a cholesterol medicine

3. Low HDL “good” cholesterol.
–For men: Your HDL is less than 40 mg/dL
–For women: Your HDL is less than 50 mg/dL

4. High blood pressure.
Your blood pressure is 135/85 mm Hg OR You are using high blood pressure medicine

5. High fasting blood glucose. *This is a leading indicator of inflammation.
Optimal: your fasting blood glucose is  less than 85 mg/dL.  Note: most labs define “normal” as under 100 mg/dL.

*Note: If your blood glucose level is between 100 and 125 mg/dL, you have pre-diabetes. At this point, it is still possible — and important —to make diet and lifestyle changes to prevent pre-diabetes from developing into Type 2 diabetes.
 

Get Guidance and Support

 
Need help making sense of your numbers?  Contact me to schedule a Lab Consultation.  Or, if you want to be pro-active in improving your numbers, consider my video-only service: Optimize Your Wellness.
 

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Heart Truths

We speak “from the heart”, trust “our heart” and seek a “heart connection”. The heart is an emotional and spiritual symbol of love and truth.

Physiologically, the heart is a powerful, muscular organ vital to our existence. Did you know that our heart beats:
» 72 times a minute?
» 100,000 times a day?
» 3.6 million times a year?
» …that our heart creates enough energy to drive a truck 20 miles every day?!

Our heart does so much for us; yet, sadly, heart disease is the #1 killer of Americans. It’s never too early to nourish your heart. Below…debunking 5 heart health myths.
 

Debunking 5 Heart Health Myths

Myth #1: Heart disease is a “man’s disease”.

Actually, heart disease is the leading cause of death for both men (1 in every 4 male deaths) and women (1 in 3 female deaths) in the U.S. Between 70 to 89% of sudden cardiac events occur in men. However, many women fail to realize that heart disease should be their top health concern: 90% of women have one or more risk factors for developing heart disease. For perspective: while 1 in 31 women die of breast cancer, 1 in 3 die of heart disease.

Myth #2: Your total cholesterol and LDL are the best predictors of heart disease.

Nope. It’s your triglycerides, the main form of fat found in your bloodstream. High trigylcerides are an independent risk factor for heart attack and stroke. The “normal” range for triglycerides is <130.

Also: divide your triglycerides by your HDL to get the Triglycerides/HDL ratio. According to research published in Circulation and the Journal of the American Heart Association, this ratio is a powerful predictor of heart disease. Less than 2 is ideal; 4 or more is too high.

Myth #3: “Vegetable” oils, like canola, corn and safflower are “heart healthy”; traditional saturated fats, like butter, lard and tallow, are “bad for you”.

I know…“vegetable oil” sounds healthy, doesn’t it? However, the oils mentioned above, along with soy, cottonseed and sunflower, are high in omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids (a.k.a., PUFA), making them unstable. When PUFA oils are stored at room temperature—eg, at the grocery store—they become rancid to some degree. When heated, PUFA oils oxidize, causing inflammation in the body. Chronic inflammation can lead to heart disease. PUFA oils are also processed with high heat and harsh chemicals, like hexane, a carcinogen.

On the other hand, traditional saturated fats from quality (ideally, grass-fed) sources, like butter, lard and tallow, are solid at room temperature and stable when used for high-heat cooking. They do not oxidize like vegetable oils.

Myth #4: Eating fat, especially saturated fat, makes you fat—and contributes to heart disease.

Are we still having this conversation?! Dr. Rajiv Chowdhury, a cardiovascular epidemiologist at Cambridge University, made media waves last March when his study on saturated fatty acids published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. His conclusion? The evidence does not support current guidelines, which restrict the consumption of saturated fats to prevent heart disease. This wasn’t new news either: a 2010 study had similar findings.

According to Nina Teicholz, who spent a decade researching the effects of dietary fats on health, especially saturated fat, for her book The Big Fat Surprise: “There has never been solid evidence for the idea that saturated fats cause disease.” This half-century bias against saturated fat, she says, was perpetuated by “a mixture of personal ambition, bad science, politics and bias.”

In fact, for women, who contract heart disease in a way that is different than men, growing evidence shows that eating a diet low in saturated fat increases their risk of having a heart attack because their “good” HDL cholesterol drops dramatically, says Teicholz. CLICK HERE to learn about the health benefits of saturated fat.

Sugar is the real culprit, contributing to inflammation and oxidative damage, increasing risk of heart disease.

Myth #5: Frequent, high-mileage cardio is good for heart health.

As someone who has been running since the age of 13, I’ve been guilty of what former competitive distance runner and fitness author Mark Sisson calls “chronic cardio”. Until a few years ago, I regularly logged 30-40 miles a week—and I wasn’t even training for a race!

While regular aerobic exercise is a good thing, excessive cardio is NOT. Endurance athletes (like marathoners) are at greater risk for atrial fibrillations (heart arrhythmia, or, irregular heartbeat) than non-runners. Why? Because they are at increased risk for scar tissue formation in the heart and myocardial injury to the heart, as well as high levels of inflammation (brought on by training) that may trigger cardiac events. In a study of competitive endurance veteran athletes (a group of men, aged 50+, all of whom had completed at least 100 marathons), researchers found that half of these longtime athletes—particularly the men who had trained the longest and hardest—showed some heart muscle scarring.

If you’re focused and giving it your all (not socializing in between!), a 45-minute workout should suffice. Better yet, consider High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), short bursts of high-intensity exercise that give you more benefits in less time (eg, 20 minutes).

When I asked this question at a recent talk I gave, every hand in the room shot up.

New study says…

New evidence tells us otherwise.  A study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine earlier this year, analyzed saturated fatty acids in the blood stream and as a component of diet. According to Dr. Rajiv Chowdhury, a cardiovascular epidemiologist at Cambridge University, and his team: the evidence does not support current guidelines, which restrict the consumption of saturated fats in order to prevent heart disease.  This comes on the heels of a 2010 study with similar findings.

Generation “low-fat”

Like most Americans, I had bought into the idea that saturated fat was “bad” for my health.

My estranged relationship with saturated fat started with my mother. She was born in Hong Kong, and grew up eating traditional Chinese foods.

My mother was (and is still) an excellent cook, buying only organic or local produce and quality meats and fish. But, as a homemaker raising her children in this country, she was greatly influenced by mainstream nutrition advice of the time (early 1980s), especially saturated fat. Though we did eat red meat, she trimmed off every bit of fat with the meticulous precision of a surgeon. She was particularly vigilant about saturated fat from dairy. She used margarine for baking—and margarine was what we slathered on our toast. We consumed only low-fat or no-fat dairy products—skim milk, yogurt, sour cream and cottage cheese. For a while, my mother even had us drinking Carnation’s non-fat instant powder milk—a ghastly facsimile for “milk”!!  She cooked mostly with corn oil and, later, canola oil, believing that “vegetable” oils were healthier.

My mother’s influence—as well as the media’s—caused me to be wary of saturated fat, and I shunned beef, butter, eggs and whole dairy for most of my adult life.

Fat is where the flavor is

My avoidance of saturated fat never extended to other meats, game or poultry. It would have been a joyless existence not to savor Chinese pork belly, the golden-crisped skin of a roasted chicken or the fatty bits of a good lamb steak.

After all, fat is where the flavor is. Traditional Chinese cuisine embraces nose-to-tail eating—and, for me, a skinless grilled chicken breast with plain steamed vegetables is an uninspired “vanilla” meal at best. Growing up, my sisters and I always fought over dark poultry meat (thighs, drumsticks) and the succulent, velvety brown strips of pork fat from ti pong, a slow-cooked anise-infused braised pork shank. I’ve always loved organ meats, too.

In my interview with Nina Teicholz, author of The Big Fat Surprise, I learned that, like me, Teicholz had been influenced by her mother’s well-intended “low-fat” dietary choices and had diligently adhered to a low-fat diet.  But, after spending a decade researching her book, which debunks the enduring misconception that saturated fat causes heart disease—and that eating fat makes us fat—Teicholz now embraces saturated fat as part of a healthy diet for herself and her family. Click here to read about the health benefits, including weight loss, that she experienced by eating more fat.

The way we ate

Saturated fats were the traditional fats used in cooking for a millennia. For centuries, the fat most commonly used in Europe was lard (pork fat), and American housewives also used lard and butter exclusively until 1900.

Since ancient times, people around the world have eaten saturated fat (in some indigenous populations, it comprised as much as 60-75% of their diet). Through the 18th and 19th centuries, Americans also relished animal viscera, according to the cookbooks of the time.

“They ate the heart, kidneys, tripe, calf sweetbreads, pig’s liver, turtle lungs, the heads and feet of lamb and pigs, lamb and beef tongue. Saturated fats of every kind were also consumed in great quantities. Americans in the 19th century ate four to five times more butter than we do today, and at least six times more lard” writes Teicholz. Yet, heart disease was unknown during this time.

The first description of a coronary thrombosis was recorded in 1912, and heart attacks became more widespread in the 1920s, coinciding with a period of reduced meat eating, the introduction of Crisco and increased use of vegetable oils.

Since the 1950s, Americans have placed more trust in food science and technology, which emphasizes novelty, convenience and processed foods that have an addictive quality, than in eating real, unadulterated, whole foods that have sustained previous generations.

How did saturated fat get its bad rap?

It started in the early 1950s when Ancel Keys, a physiologist at the University of Minnesota, developed the “diet-heart hypothesis”—the idea that eating dietary saturated fat (and dietary cholesterol) raises our blood cholesterol, and, consequently, increases our risk of heart attack. Keys also believed that eating fat must make people fat.  The diet-heart hypothesis was the basis of Keys’ famous Seven Countries Study, which found that people who ate a diet low in saturated fat had lower levels of heart disease, while, conversely, higher saturated fat intake correlated with higher rates of heart disease.

However, Keys conveniently ignored data from 16 other countries that did not fit his theory. For example, he left out countries like France and West Germany that had high-fat diets but low rates of heart disease (remember the famous 60 Minutes segment on “The French Paradox” in 1991, highlighting how the French ate a diet rich in saturated fat, yet had a low incidence of heart disease?). Had Keys included all 22 countries for which data was available at the time of his study, the date would have shown that those who consume the highest percentage of saturated fat had the lowest risk of heart disease.

Even though the Seven Countries Study had its detractors from the start, the idea that saturated fats caused heart disease took on a life of its own.  And, in 1961, the American Heart Association began recommending that Americans avoid saturated fat to fight heart disease.

Where are we now?

–In 1961, roughly 1 in 7 adult Americans was obese; today, it’s 1 in 3 Americans, making the U.S. one of the fattest countries in the world.

–The rate of diabetes has risen from less than 1 percent of the adult population to 10 percent.

–Heart disease still remains the leading cause of death for both men and women: 600,00 Americans die from heart disease every year; that’s 1 in 4 deaths.

Apparently, cutting back on saturated fat has only made us fatter and sicker by driving us straight into the arms of sugar, artificial sweeteners, processed foods and industrial vegetable and seed oils. Experts now agree that these have all played a significant role in the rise of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

Learn more about saturated fat and your health

The health benefits of saturated fat
The pros and cons of drinking raw milk
The health benefits of the unrecognized vitamin K2