February is Heart Health Awareness Month, which brings awareness and education on improving and preventing heart disease. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S. About 805,000 people die each year from a heart attack. This means one in every five people. We will discuss the leading risk factors for heart disease, medical conditions that impact the heart, nutritional changes you should consider, the benefits of exercise on your cardiovascular system, the impact stress and sleep have on heart health, and some herbal considerations that can help with a healthy heart. If you are interested in learning more about how we can help you with heart health, schedule a Free 15 15-minute phone Consultation TODAY.
Podcast 35 Heart Health Awareness Month Transcript
Welcome to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast empowering you to take a whole-person approach to your well-being, spirit, soul, and body. Join me, your host, Dr. Ana Lara, a naturopathic doctor, entrepreneur, and servant of Jesus Christ. We are not just a body, we are spirit and soul. It’s time to integrate medicine and spirituality into our healing. Let’s get started. Welcome back to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Alara. This episode is going to be dedicated to Heart Health Awareness Month, which happens every February, and this conversation is going to be a little bit different from what you might be used to hearing from your primary care doctor or your cardiologist. I want to start off by first of all sharing a couple of statistics. According to the CDC, heart disease is a leading cause of death in the United States. About over 800,000 people die each year from heart attacks, and of those 800, 200,000 have already suffered one heart attack previous to that.
This means that one in every five people is experiencing a heart attack. I looked up statistics, and it shows that every 40 seconds in the United States, in the United States, someone is having a heart attack. Those are pretty scary numbers. My hope for this conversation is to have a conversation that’s going to bring education and awareness on how we can reverse these conditions. What you can do to prevent heart disease and look at the whole person, right? So some of the top risk factors for heart disease if you have high blood pressure, sorry, of developing heart attacks, is going to be high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and also smoking. Some other medical conditions can contribute to putting someone at risk of heart disease, and that’s diabetes, overweight and obesity, unhealthy diets, physical inactivity, and excess alcohol use. I would also put in here, this is not from the CDC, but I would also include people who have hyperthyroidism or autoimmune conditions of the thyroid that can also be predisposed to having heart disease.
The percentage of deaths caused by heart disease in 2021 by ethnicity, I was surprised and not surprised, but African-Americans have a 22.6% risk of developing heart disease. Asians were number two, and that’s what was surprising to me. I thought it would’ve been Hispanics, but it’s not. It’s Asians by 18.6%. Third top percentage of people who have a risk of heart disease are native Hawaiians or Pacific Islanders at 18.3%, number four came white Americans at 18%, and the fifth category was American Indian and Alaska natives at 15.5%, and the sixth one was Hispanic at 11.9. So these are the percentages of deaths by heart disease in 2001 by ethnicity. So prevention. When we talk about prevention, 90% of heart disease is preventable and that means a healthier diet, regular exercising, and quitting smoking. It is amazing that smoking and also alcohol consumption will put you at high risk for all medical conditions out there.
This is true for heart disease. Some of the signs and symptoms to look for if you think you may be experiencing a heart attack can vary between men and women, and I’ll tell you which one is most likely seen in women. But these are all seen in men. You can be experiencing chest pain or discomfort, shortness of breath, pain or discomfort in the jaw, neck, back, arm, or shoulder. In women, they can feel nauseous, lightheaded, or unusually tired, which is the symptom that women will experience if they are having a heart attack. We’re going to start off by talking about some of the nutritional considerations. Hey, look at these episodes on Physician Heal Thyself. We’ve talked a lot about nutrition and you can go back to episodes two and three where we talk about the pillars of health. In episode three, we talk about nutrition, but in this specific category, we’re going to talk about nutrition as it relates to cardiovascular health.
These things are by no surprise. They’re not new to people. We know these things are things that can contribute, but some of the things that I tell my patients to limit is the amount of saturated fats they’re consuming. Find this in processed foods. A lot of fatty meats or high-fat dairy products, if you can limit those, sodium is one of those conversations that they say eliminated. So if you have high blood pressure, you need to have a certain amount of sodium in your body, so you can’t completely eliminate it. There has to be a fine balance. But if you’re the type of person that you’re over consuming salt in your diet, then you need to cut some of that down because it will make your blood pressure. High foods or drinks with sugar, obviously foods with a lot of cholesterol, alcohol, trans fats, some people just don’t do well with red meats, and I can see it in people’s blood work when they cut out the red meat, their cholesterol levels drop.
So, you might have to experiment with these things to see what works best for you. What are the diets that I’m a big fan of to help? Heart health is the Mediterranean diet and there’s a lot of studies. It’s a well studied diet that has proven to help reduce the risk of heart health or improve people’s cardiovascular health. So this diet is going to emphasize eating a lot of vegetables and fruits and whole grains, legumes, plant-based fats, really limiting some of those red meats, and maybe eating more fish. We’re going to talk about the importance of Omega-3 that comes from fish and other foods and how consuming a good amount of Omega-3 can really improve your cholesterol levels and just your overall health. It’s just an amazing thing to ensure you have in your diet. Of course, you want to limit the added sugars and unhealthy fats overall, but this is the diet we know.
We know that this is what we need to do. Oftentimes the difficult part is our behavior with food. If we create a plan to eliminate these foods through our diet, even if you start with two, or three things that you’re going to stop consuming, that you’re going to stop eating, that’s a step in the right direction. So I prefer that people take small steps that are small and achievable and attainable this way, they start to incorporate ’em in their daily or they’re not incorporating in their daily routine. And so that becomes a habit over routine every day in and day out. Now I want to talk about some like I said, these are things that your doctor, your cardiovascular doctor, they’re not going to talk to you about this, but I want to talk about the things you can do in addition to diet to help improve your heart condition.
Whether it’s high blood pressure, that should be something that should be mostly fairly easy to control or reverse. I guarantee if you change your diet and you start working out, your blood pressure will normalize by itself without medication. I’m not saying stay off your medication. You want to work with someone who’s going to help you if you are on medications too, if you need to be weaned off of them. But these are herbal, consider these are herbal considerations and I want to disclose this is just for educational purposes. It is not intended for you to go in and start treating yourself, but I want you to know that there are options out there that have been proven to be safe and effective in lowering blood pressure, and cholesterol, and improving heart health. So my favorite one is Crataegus. It’s also known as Hawthorne. It’s a berry.
It’s very gentle, it’s safe. It is a slow-acting cardiovascular tonic, which means you cannot expect when you take Hawthorne to lower blood pressure from one day to another, this is something that you need to take continuously month after month. We’ve been trained that it takes about three months to see the long-term effects of cgu, right? So on labs, on tests, it’ll show the effects of it. However, I have given this herb to patients and they’ll immediately right away say, I feel better. So they feel better, doesn’t mean they are better, but they’re feeling better about it. So, this herb has an affinity for the heart. It can be used long-term and it can be used in large amounts also and not be harmful. So this herb, particular herb is referred to as the food for the heart, which refers to actions that increase nutrition to the heart muscle.
So it’s giving nutrition to the heart muscle. And that’s what I want you to understand: the heart is a smooth muscle, so it’s continuously contracting. It needs the right nutrients for it to be working optimally. The heart itself also has a lot of vascularity to it, veins and arteries to and from. So it’s also receiving its own blood supply and nerve supply, innervation right for the muscle and heart to work. So Corte, like I said, it’s not a quick-acting herb. So you needed acute leave because you have high blood pressure right now. It’s not going to lower it. You cannot give that expectation. If you’ve taken it and you’ve said maybe you took it for a week and you’re like, ah, it doesn’t work, it’s because it’s not meant to be used for the short term.
It’s a long-term acting plant. We know that for anyone who has suffered a heart attack, this herb will help to repair, and will bring nourishment to the heart to help repair any damage to the heart. So if you have high blood pressure, that’s another good time to take this herb. Now, I like to use this for people who have a broken heart, or broken heart syndrome. It is a real thing, and people who experience grief will start to feel pain in their hearts even if they don’t have high blood pressure, there’s no heart issues, but they will start to feel some type of pain in their chest. Sometimes this is due to grief. And so I give this herb, it’s a berry. There are many ways to take this herb. It could be in an herbal tincture, which is a liquid extraction, and sometimes they’re in solid extracts. So it’s a little bit more of a honey type of where you’re taking a little bit amount daily and it’ll help for the grieving heart. So one of the keynotes on here is for someone whose heart is closed, Hawthorne is the berry for the heart. Now the next one, you guys are all familiar.
The term for it, the botanical herb name for it is Theo Broma cacao, which is chocolate. Chocolate is medicine, and it is healthy for you. However, if you’re eating the chocolate that you buy at the store that has a ton of dairy and sugar and all these other additives, wel,l that’s not healthy at all. But we know that studies have been done on cacao; the darker the chocolate, the better. The less sugar it has, the better it is for you. But it’s, listen to this, this chocolate has an anti-inflammatory effect. It has high antioxidants, and so the benefits of taking cacao are going to reduce your risk for cardiovascular disease. Of course, in moderation, cacao has flavonoids that reduce platelet aggregation and lowers LDLs, which are your back cholesterol, and also elevate HDL, your good cholesterol. So it serves as an antioxidant and decreases LDL, the back cholesterol, from oxidizing.
With a small amount of chocolate, you can have a good impact on the heart. It is no surprise that people enjoy a small piece of chocolate or maybe too much chocolate, but if you can take a small piece of chocolate, it can really benefit you. So the darker, the better. It’s going to lower your risk of myocardial infarctions, which is a heart attack stroke, and just improves the, it even helps the kidneys guys, the renal epithelium. It improves the function of, which will help lower blood pressure. Remember that kidneys have a huge impact on regulating blood pressure, too. So sometimes, it’s not a heart issue. It could be that your kidneys are not functioning right, and it’s causing high blood pressure. There are a lot of benefits to cacao. It’ll bring down inflammation. It’s food and nourishment to the body. Just some fun facts here.
40 grams of servings of milk chocolate provides 394 milligrams of flavonoids, 40 grams of dark chocolate serves 951 milligrams of flavonoids. Look at the difference between milk chocolate and dark chocolate. The amount of flavonoids is substantially much greater than that of the 200-milligram servings of hot cocoa mix. You’ll get 45 milligrams of flavonoids. And now the bad part is people will add sugar and marshmallows and other things, and then it doesn’t serve its purpose, right? It defeats the purpose of having the chocolate in there. We do have liquid extractions of cacao. It comes in liquid extraction, and people can take it orally if they don’t want to mess with chocolate. The sugary part of it, the other herb that I like to point out, helps with blood pressure, but it also helps the nervous system. So oftentimes, people have high blood pressure because their nervous system is on fight or flight.
So they’re running and fighting all the time. And so while you are constantly under stress, right, chronic levels of high stress, it’s going to make your blood pressure elevate. So we want to make sure that we’re doing things also for the nervous system to help regulate the heart because, remember, the brain tells the heart what to do, how to function, and vice versa. So tilia is a flower, and you’ll find Tilia herbal teas over the counter. There are tinctures, but it’s another safe and gentle herb that modulates the inflammation in the body, helps with high blood pressure and helps the nervous system. Look, there are a lot of other herbs, and I’ll put a list on the notes to describe this podcast because there are so many herbs and so many great things that you can take. Berries are very great for the heart. Of course, people are going to ask about coq 10.
It’s always going to help with heart health, but just simply adding Omega-3 to your diet are really, really important. I tell people that omega-3 is so important because omega-3’s increase the production of HDL. HDL stands for high-density lipid, and I always explain that it’s a big lipid. It’s big and fluffy, and the LDL is small, it’s a smaller lipid in size. Then we have something called LDLs, which is a very small lipid, and so it’s even smaller than the LDL and the HDL is larger. These HDLs are the analogy that I used to explain to patients so they understand, and it’s not so sciencey. There are not so many scientific terms to it, and this HDL is like a police officer. It’s big and fluffy, and it goes around picking up the bad guys.
The more of these HDLs that you have, it’ll pick up the bad guys, the VLDL and the LDL. And so it picks them up and it takes it to the liver to the jail. The liver is like the prison for these bad guys, dumps them in there and then the liver will metabolize, extract, and get them out of the body. This is another important reason fiber is important in our diet because it will grab onto those lipids and take them out through the intestines and out in our stool. So these scavenger HDLs are there to remove excess LDLs, the bad cholesterol, out of your body. It cleans out your body’s HDLs. It is a cleaner. It cleans it. So, omega threes are what’s doing this in your body. It’s cleaning out the arteries, it’s cleaning out veins, it’s cleaning out the heart, it’s removing any oxidative stress.
It’s helping the body to regenerate. That’s why it’s important to consume a healthy amount of Omega-3 in your diet, which you can get from fish if you like fish, you can get from a lot of your oils, olive oil, avocado oil, nuts and seeds have them. And sometimes people do need to supplement. My recommendation, if you’re going to supplement, is that you find a quality grade Omega-3 because if you don’t get a good quality grade Omega-3, you might end up with a rancid oil. Now people all the time tell me, I got this at Costco or at whatever store. And I’m like, yeah, that’s not a good brand. When people do get a good quality Omega-3 fish oil, they will notice the difference in how they feel. They’ll have more energy and mental clarity, and they will feel good overall.
Our cardiovascular system needs to incorporate those omega 3’s into our diet. Once again, I want just to say if you have high blood pressure, you need to find out what the root cause of it is because oftentimes I have had patients who come in who are on high blood pressure medication. I do a thorough assessment, a full workup, and I find out the root cause of their high blood pressure has nothing to do with their heart. They’ve gone to the cardiologist. The cardiologist has done an extensive and amazing full workup, and they always say, your heart is good, it’s healthy. Then what’s causing the high blood pressure? Is it hormones? Is it stress? Is it the thyroid function? Is it you that you’re not sleeping enough? If you’re not sleeping enough, that will be a problem. The next thing you can do to help improve heart health is exercise, which we all hate to hear.
You got to move the body. It doesn’t have to be anything crazy and extensive. The American Heart Association recommends moderate to intense aerobic aerobic activity of at least 150 minutes per week. You can break down those 150 minutes however you like during the week. You may want to do 30-minute walks five days a week, however, you can fit it. But they’ve done studies where if you get at least 150 minutes of aerobic activity per week, you tend to improve your overall heart health. So I recommend at least briskly walking daily, even if you start with 10 or 15 minutes and then increase that time weekly as you see fit movement is important. You got to work out your legs and get that pump working. So I’ll be putting some recommendations, the exact recommendations for both adults and children. It’s very sad, but we are seeing more and more children with high blood pressure and high cholesterol issues.
Not to mention some cardiac issues due to other reasons, but we want to make sure that children are also moving and having a healthy diet to have healthier outcomes as well. So I’ll be putting that information. There are a lot of different types of exercise activities that is still considered movement. The other topics that I really focus on are sleep and stress management. If you are not sleeping well, it puts more stress on your heart. So I’ve heard of cases where ER doctors, maybe the residents, and they’ve been working 14-plus hour shifts back to back, not sleeping much, and these are young 20, 30-year-olds experiencing heart attacks and dying because they were not sleeping well. The other thing too is when people are under a lot of stress and they’re not sleeping well, they usually need some energy in the daytime, and so they’ll turn to energy drinks and all of those things in the energy drinks are going to make your hard work hard, work harder.
So we want to ensure that we sleep as close to eight hours as possible to allow the heart to rest, recover, and repair itself. A lot of the people in my practice that I’ve seen with high blood pressure a lot of it is due to stress. What are some things that you can do to relieve your stress? It is going to vary from person to person. I did a whole episode on sleep and stress management. I’ll include it in the description here for reference as well. But you want to ensure you’re doing something to manage your stress levels and sleep. There’s a combination of herbs and supplements that I use to help with stress. Every time when I put people on those stress relief herbs and supplements, people’s blood pressure drops down.
If you are someone who has high blood pressure, high cholesterol or has had some cardiac issues, what you really want to do is first sit with yourself and ask what is it that you want. Do you want to stay on those medications forever? And if you do, that’s okay, but understand that eventually, over time, the heart will be working a lot harder and it will be compromised and more medication will be added. But if you’re 20, 30, 40, 50 years old, or even 60 years old at any age, it doesn’t even matter what decade. There are things that you can do to improve your cardiac function.
You cannot overlook those simple concepts. They’re part of the lifestyle. What are you eating? Are you moving enough? Are you sleeping well? Are you managing your stress, and what is your stress response? All of those things matter. It makes your heart work harder or it starts to slow down. And whatever it is, know that there is something out there that you can do, but it’s going to start with you. You are the one who’s going to have to take the action. And if you don’t want to take action, then the other option for you is to be on medications until eventually those risks become more and more challenging. I also want to mention a couple of things that are not commonly done in conventional medicine, and it relate to the type of testing that you can do. So if you’re young, you don’t have these conditions at this time, but you know, have a family history of heart disease, of high blood pressure of cholesterol, familial cholesterol is a thing.
Sometimes, people are eating and exercising well, but they still have high levels of cholesterol. I always share this story. I have two extreme patients. I’ve had a 300-plus woman who comes in because she has pain, and we do a full workup. No cholesterol, perfect cholesterol, no high blood pressure, it’s perfect, no thyroid issues, no diabetes, no high insulin levels, everything is fine and people won’t believe that. So you can’t judge a book by its cover. This woman is over 300 pounds and is medical, at least at this point, there are no medical conditions. The only thing she has is the joint pain. That was the driving motivation for her to come in because she knew she understood that the knee pain and the ankles and the hip pain were because of the overweight. So this is what motivated her to lose the weight, and thank God that she was healthy inside.
Now, on the flip side, I’ve had a patient who is fit. He’s a 38-year-old male, super fit. He is actually a personal trainer who trains other people. He is eating super clean. He measures and weighs everything to make sure he’s eating very healthy and very clean, and he’s taking all of these natural supplements and herbs that are really good, but he still suffers from high cholesterol and he still has a little bit of elevated high blood pressure, but he’s doing all the things he can to control that. And he’s frustrated because he has these elevated numbers. Now, the difference is he does have a family history, right? Where the men in his family have suffered heart attacks under the age of 50. So that’s what was motivating him was he knew his family history of men having heart attacks under the age of 50. And he said, no, that’s not going to be me.
He took measures to ensure that he was eating, exercising well, sleeping well, and doing the best he could with stress management. And here he is still having these elevated. Now you have these two people sitting next to each other. You’re going to think that the overweight person is the unhealthy one. I mean, this is where I ask people what health is. What is healthy? What is wellness? Those are two different things that are healthy having no medical conditions. But wellness is taking all those other measures to ensure that you obtain a healthier outcome. So this man, even though his cholesterol is slightly elevated and his blood pressure is still high, does have a healthier outcome because he’s doing all the preventative stuff. He’s eating well, he’s exercising, he’s taking all these things to help his body, and he’s managing the stress where this other person doesn’t have much medical going on with her, but it’s just a matter of time before she will.
This is two completely different situations, but it is what it is. Sometimes, our genetics do not work in our favor. However, how we live our lives does impact the expression of our genetic material. So, I want to talk about some tests that are not commonly discussed. One of those tests it’s genetic testing which looks specifically at your cardiovascular risk factors. So it’s an amazing test. No insurance will not cover it, but it is worth an investment to look at what is the family or what is the genetic risk that you have. No,w paired up with that test is a very comprehensive cardiometabolic panel that also your insurance will not cover because they don’t think it’s a medical necessity. But when we’re looking at prevention, when we’re looking at treating the root cause, these two tests, the genetic and the cardiometabolic panel, which is a very extensive beyond cholesterol, it’s looking at various inflammatory markers that let us know where are you right now?
This is real information. Where are you right now, where you’re at in terms of risk factors for heart attack, for stroke and developing disease later on the road? This will let us know if there’s somewhere in the lipid metabolism pathway that we can address and support so that you are improving cholesterol levels, heart health, reducing cardiac inflammation, and having healthier outcomes. So it gets very specific to telling you diet wise, this is what you should be eating, and those are the things you should be avoiding for the most part. These tests have been very helpful in my practice with patients because I’ve had people who do go to the cardiologist. I had a 20-year-old guy who went to the cardiologist. He was having some sensations in his heart. They did all the workup, they did very good work on the workup.
But the doctor’s like, there’s nothing wrong with your heart. Everything’s fine. Sometimes, things don’t show up on those tests just yet, and you don’t want to wait until it shows up good that it’s not showing up. But when he came in and we did the cardiac metabolic panel, what we found was a lot of inflammatory markers were high. Then we knew what to address, specifically diet-wise, supplements, herbs, and what we needed to do to target that. And it was pretty quick. Within a month, he’s like, I feel better already. I don’t have the sensations that I’ve had before. We continued this process of being on the diet, exercising, and following the regimen that we put him on, and within time, those markers came down. Now, he knows that this is what he needs to do every day for the rest of his life.
This becomes a lifestyle. You can’t listen to me. You cannot lower cholesterol and blood pressure by doing something for a month or two. You got to get it in your head. This is a lifestyle choice. Now you pay. You either do the work now and take care of yourself now or later on, when you’re older, you will pay the consequences of your actions. We always pay for the consequences of our actions; we either do the work now or pay for it later with interest. So I hope that you guys have taken some valuable key things to consider as part of heart health, whether even if you do have a healthy heart, you don’t have any of these conditions. Continue to work on the prevention. I will say this, especially because I hear this a lot from men.
Men don’t like to go to the doctor. They don’t want to hear what’s wrong. But you know what? You take your car to the mechanic when that red light comes on or for maintenance to get your oil changed and rotate your tires and do all of that. Take your body to the right doctor so that you can get a full body assessment and work on the preventative stuff because it’s too often that I see men neglect their health, and unfortunately, when they’re 50, 60, 70 and 80, they’re in and out of doctors and hospitals now. Now you’re forced to see a doctor and you’re forced to go in to do these invasive treatments when it comes to your health because you waited so long. So if you just start today and start taking care of yourself and finding the right doctor, that’s really it. If you do not find the right doctor that you can connect with and you feel safe and heard and respected, then it makes it hard to go see your doctor.
But find someone who can help you that’s going to guide you through this process of making these changes. Because your heart matters, guys. It’s the pump to our whole body. It’s where the blood is being filtered in and out and push throughout our whole body and every part, every organ. So once the heart stops ticking, that’s it. We’re done. Like I said, I hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation. Share it with someone who could really benefit from hearing this conversation. And until next time, guys, I hope you’ve enjoyed this talk. But until next time, be blessed. Thank you for listening to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please like, share and subscribe, help this message, and reach more people who may need to hear it. Leave your comments. I want to know what you think. If you’re interested in learning more about Raices, visit our website. Until next time, be blessed.