The One Kind Act That Can Help Keep Your Heart Healthy

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In today's alert, I'm not going to tell you to follow a healthy and balanced diet or to exercise or to even stop smoking if you want to reduce your risk of heart disease (although, obviously, all of the above applies!). However, I am going to tell you about one of the easiest ways to improve your heart health... and by doing this you might even end up saving someone else's life.

Donate blood. It's as simple as that.

In the thick of it

Our arteries are lined with cells, called endothelium. Blood should be able to move through the arteries without damaging the endothelium. However, when blood is thick and sticky it causes friction, which in turn causes abrasions and damage to the cell lining of the arteries.

When your endothelium is damaged, your body patches the tissue with fats (lipids), which forms a plaque by thickening and hardening. However, the abrasions from your blood flow prompts the body to thicken artery walls with even more fats, which narrows the arteries, causing more friction, prompting more patches... You get the picture. Eventually, the artery wall becomes so thick that blood can no longer flow through, and that produces a heart attack. This vicious cycle is called blood viscosity.

In his monthly newsletter, Nutrition and Healing, world renowned natural medicine expert, Dr. Jonathan V. Wright, compares thick and sticky blood to tomato paste. He says that tomato paste obviously doesn't flow as easily as tomato juice and that the same applies to thick blood — it's not going to flow through your arteries as easily as blood that is thinner and less sticky. This has been proven by Scottish researchers, who found that when patients had extensive heart disease they also had much higher blood viscosity levels than those with healthy hearts.

Thick blood also hampers your body's ability to deliver nutrients like oxygen, to the farthest reaches of your circulatory system, like the legs. That's why patients with high blood viscosity levels often first display circulatory problems in their legs.

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Easy does it

Luckily, you can reduce your risk of heart disease by reducing your blood viscosity levels. Previous studies have shown that menstruating women are less susceptible to circulatory viscosity problems than men. This is because the blood lost from menstruation seems to have a heart protective effect. However, after menopause, women's risk of heart disease increases to the same level as that of men. In addition, women with irregular or absent periods are 28 per cent more likely to develop heart disease than women with regular periods.

Since the loss of blood seems to correspond with controlling blood viscosity and a lower risk of heart disease, the simplest way to achieve this is to donate blood.

A study of nearly 3,000 middle-aged men, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, found that men who donated blood had a 88 per cent less risk of heart attack compared to men who didn't donate blood.

Of course, some people cannot donate blood for medical reasons. However, if you fall into that category, you can still reduce your risk of heart attack and lower your blood viscosity by taking high-quality omega-3 fish oil. Fish oil should always be taken with vitamin E as "mixed tocopherols", not alpha-tocopherol vitamin E.

But before you shoot off to donate blood, make sure that you measure your blood viscosity. Once measured your doctor will be able to tell you how much blood you should donate regularly or how much fish oil you should take to reduce your risk of heart attack and optimize your blood flow.

There is always a shortage of blood, so donating blood regularly will not only add to the feel-good factor, it will also protect your heart, help you live longer and perhaps even save another person's life.

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Sources:

Want to Reduce Your Heart Risk By a Whopping Percentage? Published online 10.01.12, anh-usa.org

Donation of Blood Is Associated with Reduced Risk of Myocardial Infarction — The Kuopio Ischaemic Heart Disease Risk Factor Study, American Journal of Epidemiology, Vol. 148, No. 5

Menopause and risk of cardiovascular disease: the Framingham study, Ann Intern Med. 1976 Oct;85(4):447-52.