Looking For Ways To Clean Our Arteries - Talking Diet And Awareness


by R.D. Hawkins - Date: 2010-07-17 - Word Count: 590 Share This!

Looking for ways to clear our arteries, both to feel better and decrease the chances of heart attack, stroke, coronary artery disease, and atherosclerosis is something most of us are interested in. Nevertheless, this path to better health if filled with pot holes, misinformation, and problems that may date back to our elementary school years.

Why do we need to clean our arteries anyway?

Think of it this way, your artery/arteries are the superhighway leading into your town or city. In the middle of the highway the department of transportation has decided to place their business offices, so they can keep a close eye on what is going on. This causes a traffic stack up each day of massive proportion that only continues to get worse with each car having to squeeze through a narrow opening, until one faithful day a car stalls in that tiny opening and all traffic is brought to halt.

In your body this is known as a heart attack and the D.O.T. office building consists of cholesterol, calcium, dead cells, and fibrous tissue. The stalled car is a blood clot that stops oxygen and blood flow to the heart.

How can I remove that D.O.T. Building and Restore Traffic Flow

As you can see this will not be easy but if we start removing one part of the building each day, before long traffic will begin to flow more freely reducing the chances that one stalled car can ruin our day.

Can Diet can help us to clean our arteries?

Diet combined with weight management, exercise, and not smoking are all equally important pieces of the puzzle. But when it comes to diet things can get a little confusing sometimes.

What we are striving far is to keep blood cholesterols low enough where the arterial obstruction that has taken years to build starts to disappear one brick at a time. Our goal should be to limit saturated fat intake to about 16 grams a day (7 percent of calories) and less than 200 milligrams of cholesterol each day.

But you should keep in mind that the food manufacturers know this and may not be altogether forthcoming in their marketing. Let me give you one example of this that I have noticed just recently. There is a bran of supposedly healthy butter called Smart something or the other. You know which one I am talking about, it placed at eyelevel on most grocery store shelves. One tablespoon contains 2.5 grams of saturated fat (13%). Let's say you added 2 tablespoons to your morning toast and two to your evening potato along with a little cheese (27% saturated fat). This alone would add up to almost 16 grams of saturated fat. Even if the foods you consumed at other times during the day were very heart healthy you would not be able to reduce saturated fat enough to clean your arteries. The moral here is don't take anything for granted, scrutinizing labels and claims tirelessly.

What else? To clean our arteries both safely and effectively we need all the help we can get and for most people supplementation is an area that should not be ignored. The three that I am currently implementing along with a low saturated fat diet are 700 mg of omega 3 fish oil daily, a liquid B complex vitamin, and a natural cholesterol reduction supplement. This combination has worked well for me but keep in mind that everyone is a little different, so check with your doctor to find out what supplements are right for you.

Related Tags: heart attack, clean our arteries, cleaning arteries

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