Heart Failure And How To Help Yourself Prevent A Major Inconvenience To Those Unfortunates Who Care
Eat Healthy - For Your Heart's Sake! As a veteran of four heart attacks, a triple by-pass and nine Rock Festivals in the 1970s I feel that I am very qualified to lecture anyone who is unfortunate enough to land on this page.
Only a complete idiot would not realize that, without a heart, your day to day functions become slightly restricted, to say the least.
To keep your heart "pumpin'", as the youth of today are so fond of saying, you have to give it the right foods.
All machines need fuel and, after all, the heart is the most efficient and hard working pumping machine known to mankind.
It has to continually pump gallons of blood all over your body, with no time off for good behaviour! In order for it to do this - day in and day out - you must give it the appropriate fuel.
Healthy foods are readily available, even at the supermarket, so it should be relatively easy for you to plan your own Heart Healthy Food diet that takes in your personal, if uneducated, tastes.
In a way, you'll be becoming your own personal Heart Specialist.
Which is not a bad idea seeing as their hourly rate could easily bring on another heart attack.
Apart from that, they do very nasty things to you with circular saws and tubes the circumference of a garden hose and wire coat-hangers - and that's before the good drugs kick in! CHOLESTEROL is a killer.
Well, no, this isn't exactly true.
There areGOOD cholesterolsandBAD cholesterols .
As a general rule the GOOD cholesterols are good for you and the BAD cholesterols are NOT good for you.
{You thought I was going to write BAD, didn't you?} TheGOOD cholesterolsare called HDL and theBAD cholesterolsare called LDL which, personally, I think are pretty boring names and totally lacking in creativity on the part of the scientists that discovered them.
After all, these things are very, very important to the well-being of the human race, surely they deserve a decent name, Latin preferably, with at least twenty-seven letters and a couple of hyphens! When it comes to eating Heart Healthy foods, cholesterol really comes into play, with a vengeance.
The HDL {GOOD} takes all the excess LDL {BAD} to the liver, where is broken down and removed from your body.
The reason that LDL {BAD} is not needed from foods is that the body already makes its own.
It is the LDL cholesterol that damages our hearts, not the HDL cholesterol, which actually helps our hearts by very kindly reducing the amount of LDL cholesterol in our bodies.
Notice that I've stopped using 'good' and 'bad'? I thought that, having read this far, you'd probably grasped the general idea by now.
LDL stands for low-density lipoproteins.
Because this substance has a low density, it does not flow through the blood stream as easily as it should.
The red blood cells have a nasty habit of releasing the LDL cholesterol and for some reason, only known to itself, it sticks to the walls of your blood vessels, especially in the arteries leading to your heart.
This is not an ideal thing to happen to your arteries, or mine, for that matter, for a number of reasons.
Try to guess for yourselves what HDL stands for.
No prizes are available.
Firstly, and most obviously, if the arteries have a layer of this gunk sticking to their walls, they naturally become smaller, or narrower, depending on your turn of phrase.
In 'medical speak' this is "Not real good".
Your poor heart has to work harder and faster, just to pump the same amount of blood through your obscenely over-weight body.
Not surprisingly, over time, your heart gets very tired.
Being tired, it's not as strong as it should be.
You can see where all this is leading, can't you? As in the case of this Grumpy Old Chef, the blood vessels became so built up with LDL cholesterol that a couple of my arteries closed completely.
When this happened, my heart, not being as strong as it was and also being very tired, went into a mad panic because it was not getting the blood that it needed and started beating away at a frightening rate of knots in order to try to pump the blood faster.
Coincidentally, it was at this very moment that I had my very first Heart Attack.
You can also have a heart attack from LDL cholesterol build up, if a piece of the build-up, called plaque, breaks off and floats its way merrily down the blood stream.
When it reaches a narrower part of the blood vessel, a side road, so to speak, it will get stuck and block the blood, which again causes a heart attack.
Sort of a log-jam.
If the piece of plaque travels to the brain instead of the heart, it will cause a blockage there, which in turn causes a stroke.
This, I have heard is almost as unpleasant as sitting through an entire episode of Oprah.
Therefore, it appears that it is very important to stop eating the foods that are high in cholesterol.
If we all do this then we can prevent heart disease and other just as nasty problems in our bodies.
It will also be far more pleasant to walk down the street in the summer and not see hordes of under-dressed males and females {shudder} exposing acres of quivering flesh to the sun's rays in the mistaken belief that the larger they are and the whiter they are the more beautiful they are.
Only a complete idiot would not realize that, without a heart, your day to day functions become slightly restricted, to say the least.
To keep your heart "pumpin'", as the youth of today are so fond of saying, you have to give it the right foods.
All machines need fuel and, after all, the heart is the most efficient and hard working pumping machine known to mankind.
It has to continually pump gallons of blood all over your body, with no time off for good behaviour! In order for it to do this - day in and day out - you must give it the appropriate fuel.
Healthy foods are readily available, even at the supermarket, so it should be relatively easy for you to plan your own Heart Healthy Food diet that takes in your personal, if uneducated, tastes.
In a way, you'll be becoming your own personal Heart Specialist.
Which is not a bad idea seeing as their hourly rate could easily bring on another heart attack.
Apart from that, they do very nasty things to you with circular saws and tubes the circumference of a garden hose and wire coat-hangers - and that's before the good drugs kick in! CHOLESTEROL is a killer.
Well, no, this isn't exactly true.
There areGOOD cholesterolsandBAD cholesterols .
As a general rule the GOOD cholesterols are good for you and the BAD cholesterols are NOT good for you.
{You thought I was going to write BAD, didn't you?} TheGOOD cholesterolsare called HDL and theBAD cholesterolsare called LDL which, personally, I think are pretty boring names and totally lacking in creativity on the part of the scientists that discovered them.
After all, these things are very, very important to the well-being of the human race, surely they deserve a decent name, Latin preferably, with at least twenty-seven letters and a couple of hyphens! When it comes to eating Heart Healthy foods, cholesterol really comes into play, with a vengeance.
The HDL {GOOD} takes all the excess LDL {BAD} to the liver, where is broken down and removed from your body.
The reason that LDL {BAD} is not needed from foods is that the body already makes its own.
It is the LDL cholesterol that damages our hearts, not the HDL cholesterol, which actually helps our hearts by very kindly reducing the amount of LDL cholesterol in our bodies.
Notice that I've stopped using 'good' and 'bad'? I thought that, having read this far, you'd probably grasped the general idea by now.
LDL stands for low-density lipoproteins.
Because this substance has a low density, it does not flow through the blood stream as easily as it should.
The red blood cells have a nasty habit of releasing the LDL cholesterol and for some reason, only known to itself, it sticks to the walls of your blood vessels, especially in the arteries leading to your heart.
This is not an ideal thing to happen to your arteries, or mine, for that matter, for a number of reasons.
Try to guess for yourselves what HDL stands for.
No prizes are available.
Firstly, and most obviously, if the arteries have a layer of this gunk sticking to their walls, they naturally become smaller, or narrower, depending on your turn of phrase.
In 'medical speak' this is "Not real good".
Your poor heart has to work harder and faster, just to pump the same amount of blood through your obscenely over-weight body.
Not surprisingly, over time, your heart gets very tired.
Being tired, it's not as strong as it should be.
You can see where all this is leading, can't you? As in the case of this Grumpy Old Chef, the blood vessels became so built up with LDL cholesterol that a couple of my arteries closed completely.
When this happened, my heart, not being as strong as it was and also being very tired, went into a mad panic because it was not getting the blood that it needed and started beating away at a frightening rate of knots in order to try to pump the blood faster.
Coincidentally, it was at this very moment that I had my very first Heart Attack.
You can also have a heart attack from LDL cholesterol build up, if a piece of the build-up, called plaque, breaks off and floats its way merrily down the blood stream.
When it reaches a narrower part of the blood vessel, a side road, so to speak, it will get stuck and block the blood, which again causes a heart attack.
Sort of a log-jam.
If the piece of plaque travels to the brain instead of the heart, it will cause a blockage there, which in turn causes a stroke.
This, I have heard is almost as unpleasant as sitting through an entire episode of Oprah.
Therefore, it appears that it is very important to stop eating the foods that are high in cholesterol.
If we all do this then we can prevent heart disease and other just as nasty problems in our bodies.
It will also be far more pleasant to walk down the street in the summer and not see hordes of under-dressed males and females {shudder} exposing acres of quivering flesh to the sun's rays in the mistaken belief that the larger they are and the whiter they are the more beautiful they are.
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