The Path To A Man’s Healthy Heart by Martha M. Grout, MD, MD(H) T
he top three things that get a guy down are heart disease, cancer, and unintentional injury. That first one is something you can do a lot to prevent.
As a man’s waist size increases, the risk of heart disease usually in- creases. Decades of junk food, break- fast cereal, pasta, French fries, alco- hol, and stress have routinely raised your insulin level, and you’ve begun to pack on the pounds. You go for an annual physical. Your doctor doesn’t do an old-fashioned fasting insulin test to see if you are developing insulin re- sistance, a precursor to diabetes, even though your belly bulge makes that a really good idea. Instead, your doctor does the fashionable thing these days and tests your cholesterol level. “Oh dear, it’s high,” he says. Bring on the statin drugs and also the hypertensives for high blood pressure. There is no discussion of the fact that half the people with “high” cholesterol do not have heart attacks, or that a grow- ing school of thought says our bodies naturally produce more cholesterol as we get older to help us make more hormones. A few years later during another
annual physical, your doctor says he wants to do a fasting glucose test, a common look-see for diabetes. You find your numbers are just about to cross the line that pronounces you officially as a diabetic. He hands you a prescription for Metformin, the com- monly prescribed drug for diabetes. You tell him you haven’t been feeling well; you have some muscle soreness now since you started the statin drug. He hands you a prescription for pain
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killers. Your PSA numbers are inch- ing upwards which hints of prostate cancer coming down the road. You can see that this path is
pretty much downhill. A holistic phy- sician will advise you to reverse the whole sequence. The strategy is likely to include a low carb diet with no trans fats, anti-inflammatory fish oils, maybe a short course of chelation to reduce inflammation levels, and defi- nitely exercise to lower insulin levels, lower stress levels, and get your heart rate up. You also want to increase your vitamin D level. This course of action usually allows men to greatly reduce – or eliminate altogether – the medica- tions and their side effects. The best thing your doctor can do
to ward off heart disease is to squelch the chronic inflammation inside your body that plays havoc with your arter- ies. Dr. Paul Ridker radically changed
the thinking about plaque when he found that about 70% of heart at- tacks are caused by small obstructions called vulnerable plaque, which nar- row the artery by perhaps only a third or so – too small to cause symptoms or to be detected by an X-ray angio- gram. Inflammation softens plaque. The softened plaque swells and then may burst, choking off blood flow and causing a heart
attack.That would ex- plain why many people suddenly drop dead from heart attacks even though their arteries look fine. An enlightened physician will
be much more interested in your C-reactive protein (CRP) levels than your cholesterol levels. Dr. Ridker and his colleagues also found that healthy middle-aged men with the highest CRP levels were three times as likely to suffer a heart attack in the next six years as were those with the lowest
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