plaque buildup to disappear, but it did help his arteries to open up.
They dilated, which allowed blood to flow more freely. Think about it: If
plaque is causing a 50 percent blockage in an artery, but then the artery opens up,
the same plaque buildup may block only 25 percent of the artery. That’s a viable
path to healing heart disease. The man’s chest pain went away, and his risk of
heart disease significantly lowered. In fact, I saw him recently, a decade removed
from his chest pain, and he looked as vital as ever.
A surgical team didn’t fix him. Food did.
This man’s story and many, many like it offer good news for the rest of us,
because they show that we don’t always need invasive actions to fix problems.
We each have more influence than we think over what happens within our heart
and circulatory system.
Your heart works by pushing blood to and from it through your blood vessels.
Blood, as you know from chapter 2, is a vital nutrient shuttle, moving everything
you absorb through food to all your organs. The heart really works like the
central hub. Every route, in some form or another, must come and go from there.
Trouble mostly happens in the arterial highways throughout the body rather
than the heart itself.
Here’s how it happens. The heart pulses out blood through the aortic valve
into the aorta (that’s the body’s largest artery), and that’s what sends blood out to
all the rest of the organs. Tellingly, the first place the blood goes is to the
surrounding coronary arteries, so the heart actually feeds itself before taking care
of the rest of the body. (Side note: Doesn’t that make the heart a great role model
for all of us who devote ourselves to others? We need to prioritize our own
health so we can help the people we love.)
With all that blood shuttling through the body, you can either have smooth
travelling or twelve-vehicle pileups. Accidents come as a result of things that
chip away at the arterial wall—high blood pressure, loads of excess sugar
circulating in the bloodstream—both of which are linked to poor diet. Cracks are
repaired with cholesterol, which is like the body’s plaster. When the repair is
done with lousy LDL cholesterol, it acts like cheap putty and easily cracks with
inflammation. This reveals underlying damage that can lead to sudden blood
clots and closure of the artery.
A clog means that oxygen-and-nutrient-rich blood can’t be delivered to your
brain and other organs. It means that your heart has to work harder to push blood
out and can’t receive blood efficiently to do its job well. More clogs in more
arteries equals more chances that you’re going to have problems like high blood
pressure, heart attack, and heart failure.
We can fix some of those issues with medication and surgery to clear clogs, no
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