Each of these variables is statistically more powerful as a risk, as a protection and as a behavior modifiable marker of stroke and heart attack than ANY single cholesterol number. I know how to improve each of these factors and want to teach you how to do so.
- Heart Rate Variability, universally made worse by all heart medications, is one of the most important heart health measurements and one over which you have enormous control. Understand this one issue and go a long way to improving your heart health. A related article but a different focus: Heart Rate Variability and Heart Rate Based Training: How and WHY
- Chronotropic (In)Competence is a fairly easy variable to measure, modifiable by behavior and very, very important to know your risk of heart disease. Also see Heart Rate Based Training
- Large scale measures of metabolic vitality, most easily assessed by measuring VO2 Max, are the single most powerful predictor of longevity and risk of heart death. Here again you have enormous control over this powerful marker of not only heart health but general health and risk for everything from stroke to cancer. Guess what. This is NOT aerobic exercise related in any meaningful way. Also see Intensity See also Training
- Measurement of inflammation is a strong heart risk assessment tool. This marker too is readily amenable to diet, exercise and relaxation behavioral modifications. Get those three, diet, exercise and relaxation right and inflammation goes down like a rock in clear water.
- Your degree of insulin sensitivity strongly predicts your risk not only of heart disease and stroke but many of the most common cancers. Here again, make this better and have a lower chance of heart attack and many common cancers.
- Advanced End Products of Glycation, like insulin sensitivity, are strongly linked to many cancers and to heart disease and stroke.
- High stress as measured by cortisol and your cortisol response to stress also leads to heart disease and other health problems and is interwoven with almost all of the above mentioned markers.
- Induced HDL maturation; this is the nearly mythical ‘roto-rooter’ for your arteries. Keep in the center of your concentration the old, still true, adage: you are only as old as your arteries. Inducing HDL maturation, that is creating HDL 2b, is the single most powerful mechanism of artery renewal. Also see Bringing Up HDL
Read ‘Housekeeping‘ in the articles section for some background. Also know:
- That heart disease, like diabetes, high blood pressure and stroke are multi-factorial problems. Anyone selling you simple ‘cures’ is, perhaps inadvertently, misleading you.
- Cholesterol has been proposed as the cause of heart disease; this is thoroughly discredited and as cholesterol is little amenable to behavioral change pursuing this goal is almost always futile, never beneficial and also one of the reasons most professional heart disease organizations like the American College of Cardiology no longer advocate measuring let alone treating your cholesterol number. All current literature says that the beneficial effects of cholesterol lowering drugs- there are some- are not linked to cholesterol lowering effects but to some other mechanism. Unfortunately much of the harm of these drugs IS linked to cholesterol lowering. I can add a great deal more to this topic but it would be more about debunking the role of cholesterol and not about curing heart disease so I will not expand on the subject here. See the video on this topic: Lectures
There are other important markers of heart disease risk but this will do to start; bottom-line is creating a behavior pattern that will ‘fix’ these variables. It is possible, many of my patients have done it and you can too.
I have a number of very low video quality lectures on this site; while the video quality is poor the content is not.
I will be producing very high video quality videos on each of the above topics; short, crisp, detailed lecture demonstrations of each topic.
