Archive for the 'Cardio & Blood-Cholesterol' Category
Substitute fish, seafood, skinless chicken, and turkey for red meats, and choose lean cuts (beef flank or round steak, pork tenderloin) when you do eat meat. Limit meat and fish portions to 6 ounces a day, and limit eggs to three or four a week. Use egg substitutes freely, and, suggests dietitian and writer Gail Levey, for baking, try using two egg whites instead of one whole egg. Also, she mixes 3 tablespoons of cocoa and one tablespoon of oil to substitute for one square of baking chocolate. Instead of ice cream, Ms. Levey says to try low-and no-fat yogurts, regular or frozen. Plain popcorn also makes a healthful treat, she advises.
Replace the calories lost by the elimination of animal foods with complex carbohydrates – starches like bread (preferably whole-grain), cereal, pasta, rice, dried peas, and beans. Let half or more of your calories come from starches.
Eat more vegetables and fruits to raise the amount of vitamins and fiber in your diet. You also will get fiber from breads and other starches. Fiber, especially the water-soluble kind found in oat bran, helps lower your blood cholesterol.
Use vegetable oils – such as corn, safflower, and olive. They contain unsaturated fats that lower cholesterol. Says Dr. James Cleeman, head of the National Cholesterol Education Program in Bethesda, Maryland, “Exercise is very important in lowering cholesterol. Vigorous exercise may raise levels of good cholesterol.”
The Education Program, comprised of panels of experts, was convened by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. It helps spread the word about cholesterol, and the number of patients going to doctors has increased by nearly five times since the program began in 1985.
First, one panel suggested that all adults be tested for total blood cholesterol. Levels below 200 mg/dl need only sensible dieting.
Borderline scores between 200 and 239 mg/dl may require action, depending on other risks you may have, such as heart disease, smoking, high blood pressure, a family history of early heart disease, diabetes, or severe obesity (more than 30 percent overweight). Being male also raises your risk.
If you have heart disease or two of the other risks, you’re in the high-risk group. If you have none of these, you’re in the low-risk category.
If your cholesterol level is borderline, doctors will urge you to keep your diet below 30 percent fat. Have your level checked yearly. If you’re at high risk with the middling score, your doctor will warn you to lower your cholesterol.
The first thing to be checked is your level of LDL, the bad cholesterol. If you have less than 130 mg/dl in your blood, your diet should be kept healthful. If your LDL is between 130 and 159, barring other risks, you may not have to do anything more than watch your diet and moderate your intake of saturated fats. If your LDL level puts you in the high-risk group, you’re certainly going to have to enlist in a strong diet program.
Your goal is to push your blood LDL down to under 130 if you have heart disease, or under 160 if you do not. If you don’t succeed in 6 months, your doctor may consider prescribing drugs.
Fortunately, there are many, including nicotinic acid, Questran, or Colestid. The last two are resins that trap bile in the digestive tract and carry it out of the body. Normally, your intestines reabsorb unused bile and reprocess the cholesterol it contains. When the resins remove the bile, they remove its cholesterol, too. Because it needs cholesterol to make more bile, the liver will remove new cholesterol (especially LDL) from the blood.
Doctors prescribe resins because, although they cause occasional constipation and heartburn, they are known to be safe and can lower the LDL count quickly. With a resin drug, my cholesterol level fell from 270 to 180, my LDL dropping along with it. And it definitely cut my risk of heart disease.
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1. The heart beats about 72 times in a minute, about 4200 times in an hour and about 1,00,000 times in a day.
2. The heart needs about 250 ml. of blood in a minute for its own use.
3. The heart mainly utilizes oxygen for converting food into energy. But in an emergency it can break food particles without oxygen (anaerobic oxidation) for some time.
4. The heart is an extraordinary device for maintaining blood circulation (slightly more than a gallon in the adult body) through approximately 60,000 miles of blood vessels.
5. Our body has about 5 litres of blood, and about 25 trillion red blood cells which carry oxygen from the lungs to all the body tissues. Everyday about 200 billion new red blood cells are released into the bloodstream and the old cells are removed.
6. During an average human life-span of 70 years, the heart pumps between 30-40 million gallons of blood. It beats nearly 2.5 billion times. Despite all the work it does, the heart is only the size of our fist. Despite its small size, the heart uses about 20 per cent of the total blood circulated to supply to its own muscles with oxygen. Unlike other muscles of the body, the heart works unceasingly, even while a person is asleep.
7. The heart is truly a remarkable piece of natural engineering. Day and night, whether we are sleeping or exercising, mere 250-350 g of heart muscles continue to act as our vital pump, maintaining the circulation of blood through our body with smoothness and coordination that any mechanical engineer could only marvel at, and certainly never hope to replicate it in a man-made system.
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Causes of Pericardial Effusion.
Pericardial effusion can be caused by inflammatory pericarditis as well as other factors. These include heart attacks, cancer extending into the pericardium, or kidney failure.
Cardiac tamponade may occur when there is bleeding after heart surgery, infections, tuberculosis, radiation treatments for some kinds of cancer, and trauma.
Symptoms of Pericardial Effusion. If the heart is not compressed by the collection of fluid, there may be no symptoms.
Cardiac tamponade produces symptoms of inadequate heart function, because the heart is unable to pump blood effectively to the lungs and body. People with tamponade are obviously ill. Their skin may have a bluish discoloration because of lack of oxygen. They may be short of breath, anxious, light-headed, or dizzy, and they may go into shock.
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PERICARDIAL DISEASE: PERICARDIAL EFFUSION – CAUSES AND SYMPTOMSCauses of Pericardial Effusion.Pericardial effusion can be caused by inflammatory pericarditis as well as other factors. These include heart attacks, cancer extending into the pericardium, or kidney failure.Cardiac tamponade may occur when there is bleeding after heart surgery, infections, tuberculosis, radiation treatments for some kinds of cancer, and trauma.Symptoms of Pericardial Effusion. If the heart is not compressed by the collection of fluid, there may be no symptoms.Cardiac tamponade produces symptoms of inadequate heart function, because the heart is unable to pump blood effectively to the lungs and body. People with tamponade are obviously ill. Their skin may have a bluish discoloration because of lack of oxygen. They may be short of breath, anxious, light-headed, or dizzy, and they may go into shock.*218\252\8*