Is Reversing Heart Disease a Real Possibility?

With an aging population, reversing heart disease has slowly become more important a medical goal than curing cancer. The really good news is we now understand how to reverse and even eliminate heart disease in most people.

As we age, our cardiovascular systems deteriorate. Arteries harden and clog, the heart works overtime to compensate for imperfect circulation, and in the worst cases peripheral artery disease leads to immobility, erectile dysfunction, blindness, and many other problems. Ultimately, several forms of dementia are related to heart disease, as is stroke and heart attack.

If you understand how to prevent heart disease, you also have a good idea of how heart disease reversal should work. Lowering LDL cholesterol, increasing your levels of HDL cholesterol, exercising, and eating properly all positively impact the health of your cardiovascular heart disease. Medical interventions for reversing heart disease usually include treatment with statins to lower cholesterol, and in severe cases using angioplasty and bypass surgery to clear out specific blockages.

But these methods only address the symptoms, not the causes, of heart disease. Surgical interventions, while necessary in the most advanced cases simply to save life, also carry serious risks up to and including death – and the cure is not permanent. Using statins to treat high cholesterol is often used as an excuse to not change your lifestyle in other ways. Instead, you should explore how to prevent heart disease, and use these methods to improve your health right away.

When you’re reversing heart disease, you don’t want to treat the symptoms; instead, you need to get at the core of the problem. Start by changing your diet. Switch from LDL-cholesterol-heavy foods like red meat, eggs, and full-fat dairy to skim milk, fish, and egg whites only. But more importantly, you need to start raising the amount of HDL you consume. One very easy way to do this is taking omega 3 supplements, which are heavy in HDL. And HDL helps remove LDL cholesterol from where it blocks your arteries, contributing heavily to heart disease reversal.

Read about how to prevent heart disease, and incorporate all the suggestions that your current health and lifestyle will allow for. This will get you on the right track to heart disease reversal, and will also start clearing out the years of cholesterol buildup in your system right now.

Have your cholesterol tested, as well as your triglyceride, homocysteine and CRP levels. Only ten percent of Americans today have a healthy-heart-guide.com/ldl-cholesterol-heart-disease.html healthy cholesterol level; everyone else needs to bring it down at least a little bit. If your cholesterol is very high, you can ask your doctor to prescribe statins to help you start bringing it down – but don’t look at this as a long-term solution. You want to depend on this only as a way to jump-start things, and use diet, exercise, and omega 3 supplements to do most of your work in reversing heart disease.

With all that said, the most important thing you can do is find a regimen you can maintain. If you choose a diet that you cheat on all the time, or if you set your fitness goals higher than you can reasonably achieve, you won’t stick to them. It’s just like a weight-loss diet; the success of your heart disease reversing program depends more on your ability to change your lifestyle than it does on the regimen itself. How you reverse your heart disease ultimately doesn’t matter so much as whether you manage to consistently stick to your new lifestyle.

Consult your physician regarding ways to improve your heart health, and discover how you can accomplish heart disease reversal with simple dietary, exercise and lifestyle changes.

David Bloom is a health enthusiast and contributor to many fitness sites. He is the author of healthy-heart-guide.com/heart-disease-prevention.html Heart Disease Prevention, a section of healthy-heart-guide.com Healthy Heart Guide discussing cardiovascular problems and how to minimize your health risks.

Tags: bypass surgery, cholesterol, diet, Heart

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Tags: bypass surgery, cholesterol, diet, Heart