What is the Best Way to Avoid Both Heart Attacks and Strokes?

Avoid Both Heart Attacks and Strokes - Saturated Fat and Cholesterol Myth Busted

For decades, we’ve been told to steer free of Saturated fat (meat, eggs, and dairy) as it’s supposed to skyrocket your cholesterol level.

This gave rise to the horrendous “low fat” propaganda that’s still going strong to this day.

A new study published in the International Journal of Cardiology reveals quite an interesting twist to this argument.

Looks like it’s not about saturated fat itself but what kind of saturated fat you are talking about.

The researchers collected the health information of 22,050 British people and 53,375 Danes that were previously collected by the EPIC study.

They also used country-specific food frequency questionnaires to estimate the approximate amount of saturated fats these people usually consumed.

After following the participants for a period of 18.8 years (the British) and 13.6 years (the Danes), they found 1,204 heart attacks in the British sample and 2,260 in the Danish one.

When they compared the number of heart attacks with the food intake data, they discovered that saturated fats with different carbon chain lengths had different heart health effects.

To clarify, each fatty acid has a chain of carbon atoms. Fatty acids are normally divided into short-chain, medium-chain, long-chain, and very long-chain fatty acids, with their chains ranging from one to mid-20s carbon atoms.

The authors discovered that people who consumed large amounts of saturated fats with chains of 16 carbon atoms or more had the highest heart attack risk. These fats are called palmitic acid (16 atoms) and stearic acid (18 atoms), and they are mostly found in meat.

People who ate plant proteins like legumes and nuts instead of meat also had a considerably lower heart attack risk.

Those who consumed a lot of medium-chain saturated fats had no heart attack risk. These are found in dairy products, which is why many recent studies have suggested that full-cream milk and cheese are actually healthy.

Therefore, it’s not saturated versus non-saturated that is important, as many doctors still believe. Rather, among the types of saturated fats, their chain lengths are more important than the fact that they are saturated.

But the most important thing you can do to avoid both heart attacks and stokes, is to cut out this sole perpetrator of cholesterol plaque buildup in your heart arteries (and you probably didn’t even know it existed)…

Avoid Both Heart Attacks and Strokes - To Prevent Cardiovascular Diseases, Drink This In Excess

We’re usually guided to do things in moderation, and that’s especially true when it comes to this controversial drink.

But a new study recently published in JAMA Internal Medicine revealed that drinking it excessively will reduce your risk of dying from strokes, heart attacks and pretty much anything else.

Scientists consulted the UK Biobank, a population-based study that had the demographic, genetic, lifestyle, and dietary information of 9.2 million British volunteers.

In their analysis, they only included the data of only those that had a full set of data available, along with those who were not pregnant at the beginning of the study, which totaled to 498,134 people.

They followed these volunteers between 2006 and 2016 and noted the deaths that occurred, regardless of the attributing factor, especially the common ones like cardiovascular events and cancer.

The participants ranged from ages 38 to 73, with an average age of 57. Of the participants, 54% of them were female and 71% of them were coffee drinkers.

Compared with non-coffee drinkers, all the groups of coffee drinkers were less likely to die, regarding of whether they were drinking less than one cup per day or drinking more than eight cups per day.

This held for deaths from all causes, including the most common causes such as cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Ground, instant, and decaffeinated coffee had the same effects, suggesting that caffeine was not the important healthy ingredient in this beverage.

Even people with genetic variations that led to a slowdown of their metabolism of caffeine experienced the same benefits as those who processed caffeine properly.

All this seems to suggest that coffee can protect against cardiovascular diseases, no matter the amount and the type you drink, and this was true even for those whose bodies did not process caffeine properly.

This is no wonder, as coffee is loaded with antioxidants.

Previous studies have found that, coffee contributed to more than 5.5 times the amount of antioxidants present in a person’s blood stream when compared to fruit, and was almost 30 times the amount antioxidants present when compared to those contributed by vegetables. Ouch!

But drinking coffee may not be enough to normalize cholesterol completely. For that and in addition on how to avoid both heart attacks and strokes, you need to cut out this one ingredient you didn’t even know you were consuming…

Avoid Both Heart Attacks and Strokes - How Neighbors Raise Cholesterol And Can Cause Heart Attack And Stroke

A new study published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology has shown that a specific type of neighbors can drastically increase your cholesterol level and the risk of having a heart attack and stroke.

And no, it’s not the irritating neighbor. It’s actually the one that most people want to have close by.

The problem is that we have too many of them, which could lead to these dire consequences.

Scientists from Utrecht University and the University Medical Centre Utrecht collected information of the number of fast-food restaurants within 500 meters, 1,000 meters, and 3,000 meters of the homes of 2,472,004 Dutch study participants.

All the participants were at least 35 years of age and were required to have lived at the same residential addresses for at least the last 15 years.

They were required to have been free of cardiovascular disease at the beginning of the study, and were then followed up with for 12 months to see who was the most likely to develop cardiovascular problems, including coronary heart disease, stroke and heart failure.

Unsurprisingly, those who lived in rural areas with no fast-food restaurants within the vicinity were the least likely of all the participants to suffer from these horrors, as the obvious inconvenience of the long drive to such a restaurant outweighed the convenience of buying ready-made food.

Cardiovascular disease and coronary heart disease risks were the highest for those who lived a mere 500 meters from fast-food restaurants, and the statistics were not much better for those who lived 1,000 meters away. However, the risk was much smaller for those within 3,000 meters of one.

The risk also increased with the increased number of nearby fast-food outlets within the neighborhood, along with the risk of stroke and heart attack.

But moving to the country may not be the solution you need for the healing of your heart arteries.

For more ideas on how to avoid both heart attacks and strokes, watch this video - Foods that Prevent Heart Attack and Stroke

Instead, discover how you can normalize your cholesterol and avoid both heart attacks and strokes by cutting out this one ingredient you didn’t even know you were consuming…

This post is from the Oxidized Cholesterol Strategy Program. It was created by Scott Davis. Because he once suffered from high cholesterol, so much so that he even had a severe heart attack. This is what essentially led him to finding healthier alternatives to conventional medication. Oxidized Cholesterol Strategy is a unique online program that provides you with all the information you need to regain control of your cholesterol levels and health, as a whole.

To find out more about this program, go to How to Avoid Both Heart Attacks and Strokes.