It may seem surprising, but if you want to take care of your heart, you better consult a nutritionist rather than a cardiologist.
Modern cardiology works miracles to unclog your arteries in an emergency situation : thanks to medical progress, if you have a heart attack (infarction), you have every chance of getting out of it if help arrives in time.
If you add to this technological advances (defibrillators, pacemakers), you understand why cardiovascular diseases cause fewer and fewer deaths.
But there is a problem : it is that the number of patients continues to increase !
Because when it comes to protecting your heart over time, you can't really rely on conventional medicine.
A misplaced obsession with numbers and drugs
Under pressure from the pharmaceutical industry, cardiology has become a drug-dispensing machine.
As soon as a number seems too high – your cholesterol level, your blood pressure or your blood sugar level – you are given pills to bring it down.
But does it really help you protect your heart ? Not necessarily, unfortunately.
Take excess blood sugar that signals diabetes or pre-diabetes. We know that diabetics are statistically more likely to have a heart attack than others.
But does this lead to the conclusion that it is the excess sugar in the blood that causes heart attacks ? And that it would therefore be enough to reduce the blood sugar level with a drug to prevent diabetics from having a heart attack ?
Absolutely not !
If diabetics have to worry about their heart health, it is because the lifestyle that led them to diabetes is also likely to harm their heart.
In other words, the same causes (poor diet, lack of physical activity) cause diabetes AND heart problems.
It is therefore dangerous to simply take the drug : not only will it not solve the basic problem (your way of life), but it may even discourage you from changing your bad habits, by making you believe that you are " protected”.
For cholesterol, the situation is even more absurd.
Because a high cholesterol level (between 2 and 3 g) does not even mean that your heart risk is increased ! Just look at the Japanese : they may have high cholesterol, but they have 3 to 4 times less heart disease than in the West !
Since high cholesterol is not a reliable sign that your heart is in danger, why should you try to lower it ?
That's why independent pharmaceutical researchers say there's no need to take cholesterol-lowering drugs (worse: it's quite dangerous given their serious side effects).
The treatment that protects you from stroke, heart attack...and the side effects of medication...
High blood pressure is a much more serious risk factor.
It is clear that too high blood pressure (above 16) increases the risk of stroke. Measures must therefore be taken to reduce it.
But it is also clear that hypertension is caused in 95% of cases by lifestyle habits (diet, sport, stress) that cause… heart attacks !
If you just lower your blood pressure with medication, you will reduce your risk of stroke but you will not really protect yourself from a heart attack.
While if you lower your blood pressure naturally by changing your lifestyle, you kill three birds with one stone :
- you can, in agreement with your doctor, reduce and then remove antihypertensive drugs, and no longer suffer from their adverse effects;
- you will be protected from stroke thanks to a return to normal blood pressure;
- and your heart will be better protected from infarction thanks to the new lifestyle habits you will have adopted.
This is why it is always better to seek to treat the person as a whole, and not just deal with numbers.
This is all the more important because when you settle for chemical treatment, you are likely to create problems elsewhere in the body.
By trying to artificially prevent a heart attack, we are taking quite a risk!
Anti-clot drugs are a terrible example.
In the weeks following a heart attack, you are rightly given medications that prevent the blood from clotting too easily.
The goal is simple : what causes heart attacks are coagulated blood clots that clog your arteries...we therefore reduce the risk of a new heart attack by preventing your blood from clotting.
This is great at first, but problematic in the long run. Because the tendency of our blood to clot is not there to annoy us : it prevents us from bleeding !
We see it when we cut our hand or leg : a “scab” ends up being created, which helps to heal the damaged tissue.
Well, the same phenomenon occurs in the arteries : when the wall of an artery is damaged, a clot forms to repair it before it ruptures.
If you prevent this clotting phenomenon with “anti-clot” drugs, you increase the risk that one of your arteries will break. And when this rupture occurs in the brain, it is called a hemorrhagic stroke, and it is often fatal!
You see the problem with anti-clot drugs : they reduce your risk of heart attack, but they also increase your risk of hemorrhagic stroke!
And to top it off, they have serious side effects : drugs like aspirin thin the blood but make holes in the stomach.
All of this, while it's possible to achieve aspirin-like effects naturally without side effects and without an increased risk of stroke, especially by ensuring a balanced diet of omega-3 and omega-6.
This is another good reason to pay attention to the overall balance of your body, and not to bet everything on pills that will act on a single parameter.
And this is even more true when we are concerned about the health of the arterial wall :
The real reason your arteries are deteriorating
You don't have to be afraid of blood clots when your arteries are in excellent condition. It is only when your arteries are damaged and narrowed that clots can clog them and cause a heart attack.
It is therefore this phenomenon of "narrowing" (stenosis) of the arteries that must be avoided as a priority.
But if you are offered a drug for this, beware!
First, because no one knows how this drug could work. Surprising as it may seem, to date there is no medical consensus on the biological cause of the deterioration of the arteries.
There are of course several theories. Some are in freefall, such as that of "cholesterol that clogs the arteries", totally abandoned by researchers independent of the pharmaceutical industry.
As for the most serious theories, they have one thing in common: they show that the formation of plaques on the arteries is a hypercomplex and multifactorial process.
No need, therefore, to dream of discovering a drug that would prevent it by inhibiting the X enzyme or blocking the Y receptor. Even a natural remedy will never be able to protect your arteries on its own.
There is no shortcut : it is the balance and general harmony of our body that best protects the walls of our arteries.
Get ready for a “natural bypass” by moving
Adopting a healthy and protective lifestyle is therefore the best remedy, even if your arteries are already in poor condition.
Because nature has an extremely sophisticated system to save your life when your arteries are almost clogged.
When given a little time, your body is able to make a kind of “natural bypass” on its own, similar to that of doctors.
When a surgeon performs a bypass, they create a small "bridge" around a blocked artery. It is a kind of diversion so that the blood can flow unhindered, bypassing the difficult passage. A bit like when you create a detour on a road to avoid work.
Surgical bypasses save lives in emergency situations. But if you have a little time, it is better to rely on the “natural” bridging process, called the “collateral network”.
Our body is indeed capable of creating a small arterial network on its own that bypasses the obstacle.
But beware, this natural phenomenon is only possible on one condition : that you have regular physical activity ! If you don't move, it can't work!
Sport can really save your life... even if you are the victim of a heart attack :
Imagine that a clot is blocking the artery that supplies blood to your heart. The cells of your heart are suddenly deprived of oxygen and therefore begin to gradually die (this is the infarction). The more the minutes pass, the less your chances of survival are good.
But depending on your fitness level, your heart can “hold on” significantly longer – giving you a better chance of being rescued by EMS !
Why ? Simply because well-trained muscles require less oxygen from you. You know it well : when you are not used to climbing 5 floors on foot, you arrive at the top all out of breath. But once your muscles are accustomed to this effort, you can accomplish it while consuming significantly less oxygen.
And in the event of a heart attack, it can quite simply save your life, by allowing your heart to survive longer!
And that, your blood tests do not measure it.
Measure your heart risk yourself !
That's why your level of physical activity and the quality of your diet are much better indicators of your heart health than most medical tests.
Of course, there are figures that it is worth keeping an eye on because they are statistically correlated with a higher heart risk : blood pressure and blood sugar levels, but also triglyceride levels and even, in case of further analyses, calcium score (level of calcium deposition in your arteries) or number of proteins contained in lipoproteins (LDL-p / ApoB).
But at the risk of repeating myself, in 95% of cases, these indicators are only reflections of your lifestyle.
For example, triglycerides measure your fat storage. But in what cases does your body store fat ?
Answer : in case of insufficient physical activity and deleterious food, containing too many sugars and starches (bread, pasta, biscuit, sodas, rice)!
To measure your heart risk, first examine the contents of your plate and the duration of your weekly physical activity !
Not only will you have a good idea of the state of your arteries and your heart, but also of its capacity for resistance and self-healing in the event of a hard blow.
In addition to exercise and diet, do not neglect these two other factors that say a lot about the health of your heart :
- Your level of exposure to modern poisons : tobacco, alcohol without moderation and pollutants from our environment;
- And your level of chronic stress (which includes the quality of your sleep).
Take care of all these elements of your lifestyle, and you will no longer have to worry about the resistance of your heart!
Two scientific proofs to finish
To drive the point home, here are two proofs of the absolute superiority of lifestyle over drugs.
First, you should know that heart disease does not exist among people who eat properly, who do regular physical activity, who do not suffer from chronic stress and who do not know tobacco, alcohol or pollution.
These peoples are the "hunter-gatherers", who live as in the Paleolithic period. Those who have studied them have shown that they almost never suffer from obesity, diabetes, hypertension or coronary heart disease.
For example, the Swedish doctor Staffan Lindeberg observed no signs of cardiovascular disease in the inhabitants of the island of Kitava, in Papua New Guinea, including those who were between the ages of 60 and 95!
Cardiovascular problems are therefore not inevitable. They are not “simply” due to aging.
Those who follow a protective lifestyle from an early age have almost zero heart risk, even if they live to a very old age.
And even when you are affected by a heart problem, the lifestyle remains by far the best medicine.
This is the masterful demonstration carried out by the Lyon study, published in the most prestigious medical journals, in particular The Lancet, and Circulation, the official journal of the American Heart Association, and led by Michel de Lorgeril.
In this study, the researchers had selected more than 600 patients who had already had a heart attack.
They separated them into two groups:
the first received the “anti-cholesterol” dietary advice usually given by cardiologists : eat as little fat as possible (especially avoiding fatty fish, nuts and avocados), prefer sunflower oil, avoid eggs, etc.
the other group was advised to follow the "Mediterranean" diet : rich in good fats (fatty fish, olive oil and rapeseed, nuts, etc.), rich in fruits and vegetables, whole grains and legumes and limited in animal products.
The results were extraordinary : by acting on this dietary parameter alone, patients in the “Mediterranean” group saw their risk of severe cardiovascular complications reduced by 70% compared to those in the “anticholesterol” group!
This pioneering study has been confirmed by much other research since its publication in 1994, then in 1999.
Would you trust your doctor if he didn't give medicine ?
And yet, diet and lifestyle in general are still too often overlooked by cardiologists.
Why ? It's hard to say…
One hypothesis is that they feel devalued by these basic and inexpensive measures.
When one has spent years studying to master the ultra-complex mechanisms of the most advanced chemical drugs, it can be difficult to recognize the superiority of “simple” measures of common sense and lifestyle.
"It makes you wonder if a doctor does not really consider himself a doctor only when he prescribes toxic and expensive measures", even goes so far as to say Dr. Jean-Paul Curtay.
And that is why, to protect your heart over time, I advise you to follow the advice of a competent nutritionist before having recourse to the cardiologist.
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