Improving Circulation
In This Chapter
▶ Searching for the root of circulatory problems
▶ Realizing how toxins harm cardiovascular health
▶ Considering the role of cholesterol
▶ Figuring out which supplements boost circulation and heart health
▶ Understanding the importance of exercise
▶ Cooking up a few circulation-boosting dishes
Cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death in the United States. The numbers are staggering: Recent years have seen deaths from cardiovascular causes nearing the 1 million mark, and more than 16 mil- lion people alive today have had a heart attack or significant angina (heart pain). Almost 6 million of those have had heart failure.
All this suffering and death due to ailments of the heart and the rest of the circulatory system are even scarier when you consider that just over 100 years ago, heart disease wasn’t even in the top ten causes of death. What is causing such a high rate of cardiovascular disease today that wasn’t present in 1900? A lot of things have changed since then, of course, but one of the major changes in terms of health and our environment is an unprecedented influx of toxins in our food, air, and water.
In this chapter, I present some information that could very well conflict with what you’ve heard in the past about circulatory problems and cardiovascular disease. I urge you to keep an open mind and consider that conventional medicine may be going about this extremely important fight in the wrong way; we may be focusing too much on potential causes of these diseases that aren’t as significant as we once thought. Keep reading to find out more and to discover what you can do to avoid this ubiquitous killer.
Focusing on Blood Vessel Inflammation
The major contributing factor in lousy circulation and cardiovascular disease is the development of plaque in the arteries. I’m not talking about the kind of plaque that can form on your teeth (and certainly not about the kind you receive onstage at an awards ceremony). The plaque that forms in your arteries is made up of cholesterol and calcium. Over time, it can grow and eventually get big enough to close off a blood vessel to the point where the tissue downstream doesn’t get enough blood to function. Or, the plaque can break apart and cause a plug in an artery with a clot.
When people hear about arterial plaque, most of them immediately assume that cholesterol is the problem — after all, we’ve been conditioned by news reports and millions of drug company marketing dollars to think of cholesterol as the primary cause of cardiovascular disease and circulatory system problems. (I cover the cholesterol question in detail a little later in this chap- ter.) But here’s a key question: Is the arterial plaque the root of the problem, or is it the result of another, underlying problem?
For some reason, the most popular line of reasoning in the medical field is that we shouldn’t be looking at why plaque develops; instead, we should focus on how to get rid of the plaque or the basic materials your body uses to make the plaque (calcium and cholesterol). But that approach doesn’t really solve the problem. We need to understand the reasons the body is trying to form plaque in the first place.
A growing body of evidence indicates that the initial cause for a plaque to develop is blood vessel inflammation. This inflammation can be caused by a lot of different things, and one of them is — you guessed it — toxins. Toxic materials, including heavy metals, chemicals, and biologic toxins (like bateria and yeast), can all cause inflammation. In fact, all the toxins I cover in Chapters 2 and 3 can cause inflammation to some degree, which can lead to the buildup of plaque in the arteries and a slow-down in blood flow.
To make sure you’re getting screened properly for cardiovascular disease and potential problems with circulation, ask your doctor to do a c-reactive protein (CRP) test when you schedule your next checkup. A highly sensitive cardiac CRP test measures inflammation in your blood vessels and is the best way to detect potential problems with your circulatory system. The test is common, and just about any medical lab can perform one. Multiple studies have shown CRP to be more predictive of who is going to have a heart attack than cholesterol.
Pinpointing Toxins That Hinder Circulation
In this section, I give you the rundown of how specific toxins can affect your blood vessels and your heart.
Feeling the strain from heavy metals
Heavy metals earn their name because their weight is at least five times the weight of water. A handful of heavy metals are required for normal health; zinc and copper are two examples. But most heavy metals are toxic in any amount. The most toxic heavy metals include mercury, lead, antimony, arsenic, cadmium, excessive iron, aluminum, and nickel, and they all wreak havoc on your cardiovascular system. Here are some of their effects:
✓ Aluminum and iron in high levels can cause damage to blood vessel linings.
✓ Arsenic causes major blood vessel inflammation.
✓ Cadmium causes high blood pressure and can enlarge the heart and inflame the blood vessels.
✓ Lead is also known to cause high blood pressure, which is a leading cause of cardiovascular damage.
✓ Nickel produces inflammation of the blood vessels and has been identified as being a cause of heart attacks.
The heavy metals in this list are very hard on your circulatory system, but they pale in comparison to mercury. For humans, mercury is the most toxic non-radioactive substance on the planet. I cover mercury’s effects in several places throughout this book, but for the purposes of this chapter it’s important that you know mercury is extremely toxic to the blood vessels and to the heart muscle itself.
One recent study looked at patients with a dangerous condition called enlarged heart and found that they had mercury levels in their heart muscles that were 22,000 times higher than patients with normal hearts.
Mercury can be extremely damaging to your heart. Studies of patients with elevated mercury levels have revealed increased heart attacks, abnormal electrocardiograms, rapid heartbeat, premature heartbeats, and inflammation of the heart muscle. Despite all this evidence, most cardiologists don’t pay much attention to mercury.
If you or someone in your family is suffering from heart disease, be sure to talk with your cardiologist about getting tested for mercury toxicity. Just be sure that you get a proactive urine test instead of a blood test, because mercury stays in the blood for only a few days before it goes into your tissue.
In addition to its direct effects on the circulatory system, mercury can also cause loads of indirect negative effects. For instance, mercury can greatly damage the thyroid, and an out-of-whack thyroid is a huge strain on the heart. (Read all about the ways in which mercury can harm your thyroid in Chapter 11.) Mercury can also bond with insulin and contribute to diabetes, which is a major stressor on the heart and blood vessels. As if that weren’t enough, mercury fouls up the function of your pituitary gland, which plays a critical role in regulating your blood pressure.
Here are a few other common diseases and conditions that mercury contributes to. All these ailments have either direct or indirect consequences for your heart and the rest of your circulatory system:
✓ Alzheimer’s disease
✓ Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease)
✓ Autism
✓ Candida overgrowth syndrome
✓ Chronic fatigue syndrome
✓ Colitis of any type
✓ Crohn’s disease
✓ Fibromyalgia
✓ Gastritis
✓ Graves’ disease
✓ Multiple sclerosis
✓ Myasthenia gravis
✓ Obsessive compulsive disorder
✓ Panic disorder
✓ Parkinson’s disease
✓ Rheumatoid arthritis
✓ Sjogren’s disease
✓ Systemic lupus erythematosus
Mercury is a tremendous risk to your health, and you need to take an active role in limiting your exposure to it. Flip back to Chapter 2 to get the skinny on where mercury comes from, and read through Chapter 3 to begin your under- standing of how you can avoid eating, drinking, and breathing it in.
Looking at reactive oxygen species
Many of the toxins that I cover throughout this book fall in the category of reactive oxygen species (ROS): a large group of chemicals that contain oxygen and can cause damaging effects to your body’s cells and tissues.
ROS can have a particularly nasty effect on the lining of your blood vessels. Inflammation occurs as a result, and when that happens your body starts building plaque in an effort to cope with the inflammation. Before you know it, you have cardiovascular disease. Clearly it’s in your best interest to limit the amount of ROS in your system and to limit the negative impact of the ROS already present inside you.
You won’t ever be able to cut out all the ROS because certain types are made by your body through its natural chemical processes. Even before the levels of toxins in our environment shot through the roof in the last century or so, people had some ROS in their bodies. That wasn’t much of an issue, however, because humans are able to deal with a certain level of ROS with antioxidants, assuming that proper diet and nutrition are in place.
But we live in an era of extremely high toxicity, and the ROS levels that most people are exposed to are much too high for their bodies to handle. ROS can come from fertilizers, pesticides, food additives, food packaging, household cleaning products, and aerosols, just to name a few sources. Your body can get overwhelmed, and the problem can snowball if you’re not eating the right kind of diet and getting loads of antioxidants to help your body fight the good fight. The results are often devastating, and some of your body’s systems and tissues are more vulnerable than others. Your circulatory system is very sensitive to ROS.
An increasing amount of evidence points to the fact that the inflammation that leads to the buildup of plaque in the blood vessels, which causes cardiovascular disease, begins with toxic threats like those posed by reactive oxygen species. You need to start cutting down on the amount of toxins you’re exposed to immediately (see Chapter 3) and do what you can to clear out the toxins that are already in your body (Chapter 5 offers plenty of good starting points).
Understanding the Many Levels of Toxic Damage to Your Circulatory System
In addition to directly damaging the major components of your circulatory system — your blood vessels and your heart — toxins can also contribute to problems in other areas of your body that cause indirect harm to your cardiovascular health. Three such problems are stress on your adrenal glands, changes to the way your body handles glucose, and dangerous fluctuations in your blood pressure. In this section, you get a feel for how toxins can cause indirect (but significant) damage to your body’s delicate circulatory system.
Stressing the adrenal glands
You have a couple of adrenals glands — one on top of each kidney. Most people don’t think much about their adrenal glands, but they do a lot of very important things for you. Your adrenal glands produce some hormones that you simply can’t live without, and all these hormones have an effect on your circulatory system.
The adrenal glands are easily damaged by toxins, and damaged adrenal glands can have a negative impact on your cardiovascular health right away. Here are a few ways that can happen:
✓ Stress put on the adrenal glands by toxins can cause the glands to pro- duce excess amounts of a hormone called cortisol. Higher-than-normal levels of cortisol can spike your blood sugar, which in turn causes inflammation in your blood vessels.
✓ Toxic damage to your adrenal glands can also result in unhealthy fluctuations in the amount of aldosterone (another hormone) your adrenals produce. The complications are serious and include a change in your blood volume (not good), elevated blood pressure (also not good), and damage to your circulatory system tissues (downright bad).
✓ Long-term stress on your adrenal glands from elevated toxicity can cause adrenal failure, which is nothing short of disastrous for your circulatory system.
Gauging glucose
The direct correlation between cardiovascular disease and diabetes is no secret. Most people understand that diabetics with higher blood sugar are more likely to suffer from diseases that affect the circulatory system, and they’re more likely to die from these conditions. Recently, some studies have shown that even among non-diabetics, the frequency of cardiovascular problems is much higher among those who have consistently higher blood sugar. Clearly blood sugar (glucose) has an effect on the circulatory system, and when blood sugar is high that effect isn’t good at all.
The ways in which elevated blood sugar levels challenge the circulatory system are many, and they’re pretty complicated, so I won’t get into the gory details here. The bottom line is that high blood sugar causes damage to blood vessels. High blood sugar also leads to high insulin levels, and it turns out that insulin also harms blood vessels.
A very clear connection exists between high blood sugar and cardiovascular problems, so if you’re facing any kind of heart disease be sure you go into your fight knowing that you need to keep your blood sugar in check.
When you eat a large meal, especially one that’s full of simple carbohydrates, your blood sugar spikes, and your insulin levels follow suit. Both things harm your blood vessels. This is another reason that it’s best for you to eat small meals more frequently instead of eating a lower number of big meals. Obviously, it’s also crucial to keep your sugar intake to a minimum. Even if you’re not diabetic, don’t push the envelope; you want to keep your blood sugar at safe, healthy levels.
Rapid rises in blood sugar are very hard on your circulatory system. To help keep this problem to a minimum, cut down on your intake of simple carbo- hydrates (which include sugars, high fructose corn syrup, potatoes, and anything made of flour.) A good rule is to avoid eating anything white, except cauliflower. You should also be sure to eat a breakfast that contains some sort of protein source. Doing so gets your blood sugar levels started off right in the morning so you don’t have harmful blood sugar peaks and valleys throughout the day.
If you’re worried about circulatory problems and heart disease, it’s a good idea to go ahead and get your blood sugar and insulin tested. If your blood sugar or insulin levels are concerning, you could soon see an effect on your cardiovascular health, particularly if diabetes runs in your family.
Battling high blood pressure
When you visit any doctor’s office or get a health checkup of any kind, what’s one of the first things the nurse checks? Your blood pressure. That fact alone should tell you the importance of your blood pressure on your health.
High blood pressure (also called hypertension) is a problem that has grown quite a lot in recent years. Some estimates indicate that 30 percent of Americans suffer from high blood pressure, which is a pretty scary statistic considering how dangerous the condition can be for your health.
High blood pressure harms your circulatory system in two ways:
✓ It creates tension or stress in your blood vessels, which results in inflammation and damage to these important structures and leads to the formation of plaque.
✓ It makes your heart work harder than it should, which causes unnecessary cardiac strain that can lead to thicker and stiffer heart walls that don’t function normally. Remember that your heart beats about 40 mil- lion times each year, so you really can’t afford for it to be operating at anything less than its best.
Making sure your blood pressure problem is really a problem Hypertension, or high blood pressure, is a condition in which your blood pressure is elevated at an unhealthy level all the time. Even if you have normal, healthy blood pressure, you’re bound to see increases in your blood pres- sure when your body is subjected to different conditions. For example, if you take the blood pressure of a person while she’s lifting a heavy box, her blood pressure is probably going to be very high because she’s engaged in strenuous physical activity. By the same token, if you take someone’s blood pressure when he’s taking an important test at school or at his job, his blood pressure will inevitably be higher, and in many cases higher than what’s considered a healthy level. There’s also a very common condition often referred to as “white coat hypertension” that involves a temporary spike in blood pressure that results from people being nervous when they’re in a doctor’s office. That means
their blood pressure could be at much higher than normal levels right when they’re getting their blood pressure taken!
Because of these types of blood pressure variations, you should have your blood pressure tested multiple times in a few different set- tings before coming to the conclusion that you indeed have a constantly elevated blood pressure problem. You may consider investing in a blood pressure cuff, which is available at your local drug store or online, so you can take your blood pressure at home on a more frequent basis. You don’t want to start taking blood pressure medication, which is very serious stuff, if your blood pressure really isn’t a problem. Some researchers estimate that nearly half the people taking hypertension medication don’t really have sustained high blood pressure!
Many factors contribute to high blood pressure, but one of the biggest is the formation of plaque in blood vessels, which is the result of inflammation caused by high levels of toxins in the body. All the toxins that end up in your body from food, air, and water can cause harmful changes to your blood vessels and dangerous, elevated blood pressure. It’s just another reason why you need to put detoxification at the top of your health priority list.
Putting Cholesterol in Its Place
Very few natural substances are as vilified as cholesterol. You can’t turn on a television or read a magazine today without seeing some sort of story about the dangers of cholesterol or an advertisement for a product — from prescription drugs to breakfast cereals — that will help to reduce your cholesterol.
The impact that cholesterol management has made in today’s medicine is indeed remarkable. Statin drugs, which are used to lower cholesterol, produce sales of $27 billion dollars annually. That’s a huge number!
But here’s the problem with making cholesterol the boogeyman and spending billions of dollars a year on drugs to fight it: Cholesterol may not cause nearly as many health problems as the world thinks. Read on to find out what I mean.
Natural, normal, and necessary
Cholesterol is a natural product of your body. Your body manufactures cholesterol, and lots of it. In fact, cholesterol is the basic molecule that your body uses to make many of its most important hormones, including those that control blood sugar, mineral balance, blood pressure, and inflammation.
Cholesterol is also the basic building block for sex hormones like estrogen and testosterone.
From a very simplistic point of view, it’s difficult to imagine that your body would make a substance that would kill you. It seems even more of a stretch to think that a certain cholesterol level can be fine but a level just 1 or 2 per- cent higher is dangerous and requires medication.
As I mention at the start of this chapter, at the turn of the 20th century cardiovascular disease wasn’t even in the top ten causes of death, and people didn’t think a thing about their cholesterol levels. That’s mind-boggling when you consider that in those days people commonly cooked with lard, bacon grease, and butter, and they ate many foods high in cholesterol. The genes of those people were almost exactly the same as the genes of people who walk the earth now. Why was cholesterol not more of a problem back then? Put simply, the people who lived just a few generations ago were more physically active, and they weren’t exposed to nearly as many dangerous and deadly toxins as we are. They didn’t eat, drink, and breathe toxic materials every day.
These observations support the idea that inflammation, not cholesterol, is the major culprit in causing cardiovascular disease and circulatory problems.
Looking at the facts about cholesterol
Understanding just how natural and important cholesterol is should make you think twice about the idea that cholesterol is behind the majority of cases of cardiovascular disease. Here’s another tidbit that should raise your eyebrows: Fifty percent of people who have heart attacks don’t have high cholesterol. Isn’t that incredible? Doesn’t that statistic alone make it difficult to say that cholesterol is the cause of heart disease?
Questioning the connections between cholesterol and cardiovascular disease
You can read study after study that makes the connection between high cholesterol and circulatory problems look weaker and weaker. Here are a few to consider:
✓ The European Heart Journal published a study of 11,500 patients over three years that showed that patients with low cholesterol had a death rate more than twice as high as patients with high cholesterol.
✓ The Journal of Cardiac Failure (really uplifting reading material, I know) published an analysis of more than a thousand patients with heart disease and found low cholesterol to be associated with higher death rates. Interestingly, higher cholesterol increased the chance of survival.
✓ A study reported in the Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics looked at mortality and age, sex, body mass index, and total cholesterol. When it came to cholesterol, higher death rates were connected only with people who had extremely low cholesterol.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. You may be thinking, with all the evidence that flies in the face of those who say that cholesterol is the biggest cause of cardiovascular disease, who is continuing to insist that’s the case? Well, consider this. A few years back a meeting of the National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) took place, and during that meeting the decision was made to lower the acceptable levels of cholesterol. As a result, 20 mil- lion Americans who didn’t have high cholesterol levels before the meeting suddenly had them after the meeting. That’s pretty shocking, but it’s even more of a worry when you find out who sat on the committee that made the decision. Of the nine members on the committee, eight had financial connections to the manufacturers of statin drugs (drugs that are purported to lower cholesterol), and at the time they didn’t disclose those relationships. Sort of seems like a case of the fox guarding the hen house, does it not?
Realizing that statin drugs aren’t the answer
Conventional medicine’s biggest weapons in the fight against cholesterol are statin drugs. These are the drugs that can reduce cholesterol levels in your body. You may have seen commercials that say statin drugs will reduce cardiovascular events (things like heart attacks) by about 33 percent. Sounds promising, right? Not so fast. Consider what the number means.
Let’s say that a drug company monitors 100 people who aren’t taking statin drugs, and three of those people have a heart attack. The company also monitors another 100 people who are taking statin drugs, and only two of them have a heart attack. Two versus three is a 33 percent decrease in heart attacks in the group taking statin drugs. Most people would look at that same data and say there there’s really a reduction of only 1 in 100, but of course the folks selling the statin drugs are interested in finessing the data in a slightly different way.
Here are a couple other reasons that you may want to think hard before turn- ing to statin drugs as your primary means of fighting heart disease:
✓ Statin drugs slow down enzymes that the body uses to make cholesterol.
However, some of these enzymes help to make other enzymes that are used in every cell in your body in the generation of energy. This is why people who take statins often have leg cramps and aches; their muscles basically run out of energy and start contracting in weird ways.
You have an enzyme in your body called coenzyme Q10, which plays a key role in generating energy for your cells. Statin drugs can inhibit the production of coenzyme Q10, so if you’re taking statins be sure you’re also supplementing with coenzyme Q10.
✓ Several studies have demonstrated that statin drugs don’t reduce the size of the plaque in the arteries.
I’m a firm believer that inflammation caused by toxins is the major cause of plaque formation in blood vessels and, therefore, a top cause of heart disease. And I’m not the only person to hold this belief. If you want to keep your heart and your circulatory system in good shape, don’t immediately get fixated on cholesterol and start reaching for the statin drugs. Start by eating a healthy, detoxified diet; consider the methods of detoxification that I describe through- out this book; and get plenty of exercise.
Supplementing to Help Circulation
Several natural supplements are showing quite a lot of promise in fighting circulatory system ailments. In addition, any supplement that helps to reduce toxicity is a huge step in the right direction. Here are some of the supplements that have shown the most promise thus far:
✓ Alpha-lipoic acid (ALA): A powerful antioxidant that reduces blood pressure.
✓ Chlorella: Known to reduce blood pressure and help to reduce the levels of heavy metals in the body.
✓ Coenzyme Q10: Reverses energy starvation in the heart muscle, which can help prevent abnormal heart rhythms.
✓ Folic acid: Reduces blood pressure in women and peripheral vascular disease in men.
✓ Garlic: Good in your pasta and also as a supplement. It has a long history of reducing blood pressure and cholesterol.
✓ Ginseng: A dynamic supplement with a powerful antioxidant effect. It reduces hypertension, improves cardiovascular function, and improves glucose control.
✓ L-arginine: Improves the functioning of the cells that line the arteries and also improves exercise tolerance in patients with congestive heart failure.
✓ Lycopene: An antioxidant that was shown in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition to cut cardiovascular disease by one half. Not bad!
✓ Magnesium: Lowers blood pressure and subsequent stress on the arteries and heart muscle.
✓ Omega-3 fatty acids: Reduce your risk for heart disease. (These claims are supported by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.)
✓ Resveratrol: An antioxidant found in red wine and grape skins. You can also find it as a supplement in tablet or capsule form. A study in Cardiovascular Drug Reviews showed that resveratrol improves vascular cell function and helps to prevent the growth of plaque.
✓ Vitamin C: A potent antioxidant.
These supplements can be helpful, but you should always work hard to include as many antioxidant-rich foods in your diet a possible. Antioxidants are critical for neutralizing the reactive oxygen species (ROS) that I describe earlier in this chapter. Eat your organic fruits and veggies!
Recognizing the Importance of Exercise
Is there anyone who doesn’t agree that exercise is one of the most important things you can do to help keep your body healthy? Exercise has long been recognized and celebrated as a key component in a healthy, happy lifestyle. But in my view exercise still isn’t emphasized enough when it comes to its benefits and potential for preventing and treating disease, especially cardio- vascular disease. I could fill up a chapter with the benefits of exercise for your circulatory system, but here are just a few highlights:
✓ Exercise causes temporary increases in blood pressure. I know that I’ve said several times in this chapter that high blood pressure is one of the worst things for your circulatory system, but the very short-term increases in blood pressure that result from exercise are actually good for you because they keep your blood vessels pliable and strengthen your heart muscle.
✓ Exercise reduces blood sugar levels, which in turn helps to reduce the toxic effects of sugar and insulin on your blood vessels and the rest of your circulatory system.
✓ Muscles that are being exercised are the only things that can take glucose out of your blood vessels and use it without the presence of insulin. Your brain is affected by blood glucose levels, so exercising is almost as good for the mind as it is for the body!
Making sure you exercise regularly
Many health and medical organizations suggest exercising three to five times per week. That’s fine, but I suggest that you should get some kind of exercise every day. If you exercise every day, you of course enjoy additional health benefits, but there’s another important factor to consider: Making exercise a normal part of your day is the only way that you can really make a habit out of it, which is a critical step. When exercise isn’t part of your daily routine, you’re much more likely to dread it and end up putting it off. Before you know it, you’re putting it off so much that you’re not even exercising three to five times per week.
If you don’t exercise at all now, exercising every day will probably seem like a struggle, but you need to force yourself to do it. For the first couple months, you may have to really fight the urge to skip exercising. But for most people, three months is the sweet spot; that’s the point by which exercise really becomes a habit. By then it gets a lot easier, and after three months most people say that they miss exercise and feel a lot worse if they don’t do it.
When you’re exercising, in addition to getting lots of good cardiovascular benefits, you’re also working up a sweat. Sweating is one of the best ways to clear toxins out of your body, so you’re getting fit and detoxifying at the same time!
Considering a few different types of exercise
You should consider doing several different types of exercise, each of which has unique benefits:
✓ Aerobic exercise increases your heart rate and your body’s need for oxygen. Walking and jogging are common types of aerobic exercise. I recommend walking because of the injuries incurred from jogging. Can you believe that of all the sports activities in the United States (including professional sports), jogging causes the most injuries? If you’re already a jogger, please just be careful to stretch, wear appropriate shoes, and take good care of your joints.
If you don’t currently exercise but you want to begin walking, your goal should be to start slow and walk for short periods of time. Over the course of a few weeks (or months, if you’re in bad shape now), you should be able to reach the point where you’re walking as fast as you can for up to 30 minutes a day. Most people can walk 4 miles per hour when they’re walking quickly, so you should be able to walk about 2 miles in a 30-minute walking session.
If you have medical problems, you should contact your physician to make sure that it’s safe for you to exercise. If you have a problem with any weight-bearing parts of your body, you may be able to exercise on a bicycle or stationary bike. Some people also like stair climbers. The idea is to find what you can do and keep with it. People with arthritic problems often find that exercise increases their ability to perform activities without pain.
✓ Resistance training (or weight training) includes a whole variety of maneuvers that involve pushing or pulling on something that doesn’t easily move. It’s a great way to build strength and muscle tone, which increases endurance in performing daily activities. Resistance training also has beneficial effects on glucose utilization. The amount of resistance used will be different for each person but should be taxing to produce good results. You’ll have a harder time working up a sweat with resistance training than with aerobic exercise, but give it a try. You may get to the point where you’re pumping iron and pumping excess iron (and other heavy metals) out of your body through your sweat!
✓ Rebounding, which is a type of exercise that is often overlooked, involves the use of a rebounder or mini trampoline. Some people scoff at this kind of workout, but they shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it. There’s a unique process in play with rebounding: As you bounce, you reach a maximum height before you start down. At that instant, you are effectively at zero gravity. When that happens, every blood vessel in your body enjoys minimal effects from blood pressure. At the other end of a bounce, when you’re at the bottom and start to come up again, you experience two to three times the force of gravity, and your blood pushes hard against the walls of your blood vessels. This up and down pressure on the blood vessels helps to keep them toned and flexible, which can have extremely positive effects on their health. Rebounding also increases the flow of lymph throughout you body, which is very beneficial for you immune system. Of course, if you’re very clumsy and bounce off the mini trampoline and break a lamp, your blood pressure will likely get a real spike, but that shouldn’t happen too often after you get the hang of it!
If you want to really see the benefits of exercise, try incorporating all three types I mention here: aerobic, resistance, and rebounding. Set a weekly schedule, and do each method on a different day. You’ll get some wonderful circulatory system benefits, but you’ll also give virtually every other part of your body a boost, as well. Exercise stimulates the gastrointestinal tract to be more regular, increases endorphins (the feel-good chemicals in the brain), helps to defeat depression, and does terrific things for the lungs. If you can work up and maintain a good sweat, you’ll also help to flush out toxins from your body, which will take stress off your immune system and help to protect you from illness.
I personally believe that daily exercise and sweating will give you at least ten extra years of disease-free, healthy life (if you combine these efforts with detoxification and a reduction in the amount of toxins you take in, of course).
Recipes for Improved Circulation
A healthy, wholesome, toxin-free diet is key when fighting diseases of the cir- culatory system and generally working to improve the health of your blood, blood vessels, and heart. Try out some of these tantalizing recipes and rest assured that you’re doing wonders for your body while you’re delighting your palette.
Fennel Orange Salad with Sesame Dressing
Fennel is high in quercetin flavonoids, which are powerful antioxidants. It also contains anethole, which reduces inflammation in the body and can be a great way to fight car- diovascular disease. And both fennel and oranges are very high in vitamin C, which neu- tralizes free radicals. Fiber, potassium, and folate (a B vitamin), which are also present in fennel, help reduce the amount of homocysteine in your blood. Homocysteine levels are considered a risk factor for heart attacks.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about fennel is that while it contains a huge variety of healthy materials, it also tastes wonderful! It’s crunchy and sweet with a licorice taste — the perfect complement to juicy and tart oranges.
1 Cut the root end off the fennel and cut off the tough green stems, leaving some green attached to the bulb. Pull off the outer skin and discard. Cut fennel bulb in half, then thinly slice it crosswise. Arrange on watercress on a serving platter with oranges and radishes.
2 In small bowl, combine oil, orange juice, lemon juice, vinegar, stevia, and pepper; mix well. Drizzle over salad and top with sesame seeds. Serve immediately.
Banana-Watermelon Smoothie
Smoothies are so easy to make, and everyone loves them. They will cool you down on a hot day, and nothing makes a better breakfast when you’re a little bit pressed for time.
Watermelon is very high in lycopene, an antioxidant that can help reduce the risk of car- diovascular disease. Men who had high levels of lycopene in their body fat were 50 per- cent less likely to suffer a heart attack. You can only obtain lycopene by eating red or pink fruits and vegetables, like tomatoes, cherries, watermelon, and pink grapefruit.
1 Combine all ingredients in food processor or blender and process or blend until smooth. Serve immediately.
Spicy Black Bean and Spinach Soup
Black beans and spinach contain lots of magnesium, a nutrient essential to lung and heart health. Combined with tomatoes, which are high in lycopene, and flaxseed, which contains lots of omega-3 fatty acids, this soup is like a prescription in a bowl (only tastier and much more natural)!
You can make this soup ahead of time; just leave out the spinach, flaxseed oil, lemon juice, and seeds. Refrigerate up to three days. Gently reheat the soup, and then bring it to a simmer. Add the spinach and let wilt, and then continue with the recipe.
1 Look over black beans, picking out any shriveled beans or extraneous matter. Rinse beans well and drain. Place in large bowl; cover with 6 cups water. Cover and let stand overnight.
2 In the morning, drain the beans and place in large pot. Add 1 chopped onion and 3 cloves garlic; cover with 9 cups filtered water. Bring to a simmer; reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer 2 hours until beans are tender.
3 In skillet, heat olive oil over medium heat. Add remaining onion, remaining garlic, and jalapeno peppers; cook 4–5 minutes until tender. Add to black beans along with toma- toes, carrots, turmeric, oregano, and cayenne pepper. Bring to a simmer; simmer 30–40 minutes until vegetables are tender.
4 Stir in spinach leaves; cook and stir until spinach wilts. Remove from heat and stir in flaxseed oil and lemon juice. Serve immediately, garnished with pumpkin and sunflower seeds.
Baked Ginger Salmon with Tomato Coulis and Asparagus
You should eat wild salmon twice a week for your health. This robust and flavorful fish is bursting with omega-3 fatty acids, which are very important to heart health. And adding ingredients high in lycopene and vitamin C, like tomatoes, makes this dish even better for you.
1 Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Place salmon on baking dish. In small bowl, combine live oil, ginger root, 2 cloves minced garlic, lemon juice, and pepper; spread over salmon. Bake salmon for 25–40 minutes until fish flakes with a fork.
2 In medium bowl, combine all the tomatoes, onions, orange juice, flaxseed oil, 1 minced clove garlic, parsley, and basil. Cover and refrigerate.
3 Meanwhile, heat water and asparagus until simmering; reduce heat to low and simmer 5–6 minutes until crisp-tender. Drain.
4 When salmon flakes when tested with a fork, place on serving platter along with asparagus. Serve the tomato mixture on the side.
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