Thursday, March 10, 2011

Causes of heart disease

Heart disease has been killing Americans in droves for the last several decades. A quadruple bypass has become a common procedure. While recent studies have shown cave men also had clogged arteries, this disease is affecting younger and younger people. Some of the major causes of the recent epidemic of heart disease are:

a) Lack of eating greens like spinach in an industrial age diet. Spinach and certain other greens contain TMG which greatly reduces homocysteine, the natural byproduct of digesting meat that scrapes arteries. Homocysteine has been likened to "thousands of tiny bits of glass" running through the bloodstream. As the body heals the scraped arterial walls with scar tissue, it also clogs them.

b) Trans fats. These are industrial fats ("partially-hydrogenated oils") that are artificially altered to make them last longer. They are now illegal in New York City and generally considered poison. Whole Foods refuses to sell them. Yet anybody who lived through the 70s, 80s and 90s ate a lot of them. They were in everything from McDonald's to Little Debbie's to plain old Wesson oil. Trans fats have been strongly linked to heart disease. Incidentally, because they happen to be saturated fats, they unduly gave saturated fat a bad name.

No comments:

Post a Comment