The Great Cholesterol Myth (36 page)
Read The Great Cholesterol Myth Online
Authors: Jonny Bowden
One of the active ingredients in garlic—
allicin
—also has significant antiplatelet activity. That means it helps prevent platelets in the blood from sticking together. To understand just how important that is, consider that many heart attacks and strokes are caused by spontaneous clots in the blood vessels. The anticoagulant effect of garlic is an important health benefit.
Worth knowing: The preparation of garlic is critical for it to release its health-providing benefits. If for any reason you had the impulse to swallow a garlic clove whole, not much would happen. The garlic clove has to be crushed or chopped—the more finely the better—for the compounds in it to mix together to create
allicin
, the active ingredient responsible for the health benefits. Allicin starts degrading immediately after it’s produced, so the fresher it is when you use it, the better. (Microwaving destroys it completely.) Garlic experts advise crushing a little raw garlic and combining it with cooked food. If you add it to food you’re sautéing, do it toward the end so the allicin is freshest.
Fast Action Plan:
Start cooking with garlic.
Everyone reading this book needs to know this: You can prevent and even heal heart disease through diet, exercise, and/or nutritional supplements.
But if you’re interested in doing that—and we’re pretty sure you are, or you wouldn’t be reading
this—diet, exercise, and supplements are only a part of the picture. The many hidden emotional and psychological risk factors that are hardly ever addressed by conventional medicine are equally important—and sometimes even more so. They include suppressed anger, rage, the loss of love (what Dr. Sinatra calls “heartbreak”), and the emotional isolation that results from lack of intimacy with other people; we’ve touched on some of this in the previous chapter on stress.
Opening your heart to your feelings and learning how to express them in a healthy way will do far more for your heart and your overall health than you might imagine. Here are some specific ways you can accomplish this.
When people are subjected to chronic stress, they oftentimes become tense and rigid. They take shallow breaths. Improper breathing can, over the course of time, result in actual physical changes in the body, such as a more rigid upper body, including the chest and shoulders. High chest breathing tends to be rapid and shallow and is frequently associated with emotional upset, physical tension, or ordinary mental stress. Slow, rhythmic, deep abdominal breathing, however, is physiologically more suited to the body and has the added benefit of allowing a greater intake of oxygen.
Proper breathing has been the subject of many stress-management programs. It’s the first place you start when you learn to meditate, and it’s a principle focus of yoga. In Gestalt psychotherapy, deep breathing is used as a vehicle to loosen up the energy of the chest and to free emotions.
A more prolonged form of deep breathing is meditation, which has an impressive amount of research showing that it lowers blood pressure effectively. Cardiologist Herbert Benson, M.D., has been doing pioneering research on meditation and deep breathing for decades. An associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and founder of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, he coined the term “the Relaxation Response” to refer to a physical state of deep rest that changes the physical and emotional responses to stress. And it’s all based on deep breathing and calming the mind.
Benson was able to show time and again that the relaxation response decreases the heart rate, lowers blood pressure, slows the rate of breathing, and relaxes the muscles. It also increases levels of nitric oxide—a molecule that’s important for circulation and improved blood flow. Tai chi, meditation, yoga, and mindfulness are all able to elicit the relaxation response.
According to the Benson-Henry Institute, between 60 and 90 percent of all doctor visits are for complaints related to, or affected by, stress. “Scores of diseases and conditions are either caused or made worse by stress,” Benson has said. “These include anxiety, mild or moderate depression, anger, hostility, hot flashes of menopause, infertility, PMS, high blood pressure, and heart attacks. Every one can be caused by stress or exacerbated by it. And to the extent that that’s the case, the relaxation response is helpful.”
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Allow ten to twenty minutes to try this simple technique:
• Sit quietly in a comfortable position.
• Close your eyes.
• Deeply relax all your muscles beginning at your feet and progressing up to your face. Keep them relaxed.
• Breathe through your nose. Become aware of your breathing. As you breathe out, say the word
one
silently to yourself. For example, breathe in . . . out, (one), in . . . out (one), etc. Breathe easily and naturally.
• Continue for ten to twenty minutes.
• You may open your eyes to check the time, but don’t use an alarm. When you finish, sit quietly for several minutes at first with your eyes closed and later with your eyes open. Don’t stand for a few minutes.
“Don’t worry about whether you are successful in achieving a deep level of relaxation. Maintain a passive attitude and permit relaxation to occur at its own pace. When distracting thoughts occur, try to ignore them by not dwelling upon them and return to repeating
one
.”
—From
The Relaxation Response
by Herbert Benson, M.D., used with permission
NOTE:
Try not to do this within a couple hours of eating. According to Benson, the digestive process seems to interfere with eliciting the relaxation response.
See the sidebar on how you can do the relaxation response.
Next to love, crying is perhaps the most healing activity for the heart. It frees the heart of muscular tension and rigidity. Sobbing enhances oxygen delivery. Man is the only primate able to weep for emotional reasons. Weeping is nature’s way of releaseing the pain of heartbreak and preventing death. Any expression of feeling will help to heal your heart. Despite what we’re taught, it’s not weak to show your feelings. In fact, it’s far healthier than “stuffing” your feelings and seething silently.
Laughing is a way of experienceing strong feelings, just as crying is. (In fact, strenuous laughter often turns into tears.) When you laugh fully, breathing increases, freeing up the rigidity in the chest, diaphragm, and even deep down in the psoas muscles. As a spontaneous release of energy, laughter has the potential to be extremely therapeutic.
Over the course of his lifetime, Norman Cousins, the legendary journalist and editor of the
Saturday Evening Post
, suffered from a number of serious medical conditions, including heart disease and ankylosing spondylitis, a disease characterized by chronic inflammation along the axial skeleton. At one point, doctors gave him little hope of surviving. He ignored their doomsaying and developed his own program for recovery that involved love, hope, faith, and, courtesy of the Marx Brothers films he loved to watch, an awful lot of laughter.
Although he eventually died of heart failure at age seventy-five, Cousins lived far longer than his doctors predicted, a full thirty-six years after first being diagnosed with heart disease. (Cousins also did research on the biochemistry of human emotions at the School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, and wrote two important books on emotion, healing, and illness—
Anatomy of an Illness
and
The Healing Heart
.)
Have you ever wondered why some elderly people look much younger than their stated age while some younger people look so much older? This observation was studied by a Russian gerontologist who examined 15,000 individuals over the age of eighty in provinces of the former Soviet Union. He found several common denominators or markers for longevity. People who lived the longest reported working outdoors, high levels of physical activity, and a diet high in vegetables, fruits, and fresh whole grains. But several of the common denominators involved relationships, intimacy, and sexuality.
Many of these individuals continued to have an active sex life well into their eighties and nineties. And why not? Aging couples who are committed to one another’s pleasure can adapt sexually to the aging process. On an emotional level, sexuality provides a sense of security, connectedness, and emotional intimacy. When sexuality is an expression of love, the energies of the partners can fuse in harmony like two tuning forks vibrating with the same frequency. Feelings of warmth, connectedness, and emotional intimacy can help open our hearts.
Showing and expressing feelings can be a huge challenge for some people, particularly men. But getting in touch with your feelings doesn’t have to be embarrassing at all. You don’t have to get up in front of some encounter group and spill your guts to strangers. All it may take is a pencil and paper.
A writing exercise developed by social psychologist James Pennebaker has been tested in dozens of studies in which subjects were assigned to write about either mundane activities, such as running errands, or personal traumas. The technique is pure simplicity. You write your deepest thoughts and emotions about any event, situation, person, or even trauma for about fifteen minutes on four consecutive nights. Pennebaker has found that people who do this simple, private exercise show improvements in immune system functioning, are less likely to visit doctors, get better grades in school, and miss fewer days of work.
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Touch therapy or massage appears to be associated with a decreased heart rate, decreased blood pressure, and increased endorphin release, resulting in an increased sense of relaxation and heightened well-being. In humans, massage can be considered a tranquilizer with absolutely no side effects!
Remember the parasympathetic (slowing down) and the sympathetic (speeding up) nervous systems? Massage activates the parasympathetic system and provides a nice, healing balance to the typical sympathetic overdrive experienced by type-A, coronary-prone individuals.
Play is one of the most healing things you can do for your heart health and your emotional well-being. And most adults have no idea how to do it. Sure, we talk about “playing” tennis or golf, but sports are different—though enjoyable, they’re not healing because they involve performance, competition, and the need to win! (Just ask Dr. Jonny how he feels after losing a tennis match!)
Play is totally different. True play is spontaneous and has no agenda, rules, or regulations, or even a desired outcome. When we play, we are totally free. That is, we do things solely for joy and pleasure. When we play, we become totally absorbed in what
we are doing; we are taken out of our heads (and down into our bodies). Time stops for us.
Think of how completely absorbed five- or six-year-olds become when they’re painting a picture. Within minutes, nothing else matters to them but the colors, the feel of the brush on the paper, the way the paint drips and blobs and runs, the way the colors mix, and how closely they can match the picture with the image in their minds. Being carried away by their imaginations and getting their inspirations down on paper is, for a short time, the single most important thing in the world to them. Everything else falls away—worries, fears, wants, needs, hunger—and is replaced by a sense of total involvement, excitement, satisfaction, and gratification.
If you can play even partially this way, it can completely cut you free from stress and worry and help heal your mind and heart. Because of this nearly miraculous benefit of play, we encourage you to play like children. If, like most adults, you’ve forgotten how, observe children and see what they do.
Remember, play has no outcome, no goal. You need to play for play’s sake alone, and, when you play, try to bring out the little child inside you. Once you connect with your inner child—believe us, we all have one—it will bring you to another level of healing.
Foods can fuel your heart, supplements can support it, and exercise can strengthen it. But never neglect the “hidden” emotional and psychological risk factors that contribute to the development of heart disease as surely as smoking, a high-sugar diet, stress, high blood pressure, and lack of exercise do.
Building and maintaining strong emotional connections with other people is one of the best stress-management strategies on the planet. It’s also one of the best ways to keep your heart healthy and your soul nourished. Next to exercise, it’s the closest thing we have to a panacea. It also makes life a lot more rich, a lot more fun, and a lot more gratifying.
Enjoy the journey.
Adenosine triphosphate (ATP)
—the body’s energy molecule.
Adrenal glands
—endocrine glands that sit on top of the kidneys. They secrete stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline.
Adrenaline (also known as epinephrine)
—a hormone secreted by the adrenal glands that increases heart rate, constricts blood vessels, and participates in the “fight or flight” response.
Advanced glycation end products (AGEs)
—the end products of a reaction in which a sugar molecule bonds to a protein molecule. AGEs are implicated in many chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.
All-cause mortality
—death from any cause whatsoever.
Allicin
—the major biologically active component of garlic, responsible for its broad spectrum of antibacterial activity.
Alpha-linolenic acid (ALA)
—a plant-based omega-3 fatty acid that helps reduce inflammation and is found in flaxseed, chia seeds, hemp, and walnuts.
