Cholesterol is a great subject to learn about and heart attacks are another great subject. When a person goes to the doctor and they tell them to watch their cholesterol to prevent a heart attack, they are only talking about one kind of heart attack, a myocardial infarction heart attack. This is the kind of heart attack that is caused by cholesterol clogging up the arteries, which starves the heart muscle of blood and oxygen until it seizes or maybe even dies. This kind of heart attack is common, but not nearly as common as another kind. The cardiomyopathy heart attack occurs three times as often and kills way more people, but for reasons we’ll talk about shortly, it is rarely mentioned.
First let’s talk about myocardial infarction. The heart is a big muscle that never stops working. Because it never takes a break, it needs lots of nutrients and lots of oxygen. If it runs short on either one, you’re in big trouble! The body knows this and does everything possible to keep the heart in excellent condition, but things happen.
One of the things that happens is that the arterial walls sustain some kind of damage. When an artery is damaged, the body needs to protect it until it heals. To protect the artery, the liver produces substances (cholesterol is only one of them) that stick to the damaged part of the artery and form something similar to a scab. When the arterial damage heals, the scab dissolves and is reabsorbed by the liver. At least that’s what’s supposed to happen.
Today’s diet of processed and artificial sugars, GMO and processed wheat products, artificial ingredients and such has drastically increased the amount of damage done to people’s arteries. The increase has caused an acceleration of damage to the point where scabs are formed faster than they can heal and dissolve. If this is sustained long enough, the scabs get so thick that they block the blood flowing through the artery. When the artery is blocked, no blood gets to the hard working muscle and it either goes limp or dies of asphyxiation (no oxygen). This is a myocardial infarction heart attack.
There are a couple remedies for myocardial heart attacks, one of them is cholesterol reducing drugs, but if the blockage is already too bad, they may need to go in and do bypass surgery. This is where they take the blocked artery out of the heart and replace it with a clean artery that they take from the leg. The artery in the leg will grow back.
If one or more arteries in the heart are blocked, surgery is essential, but there is some controversy about taking cholesterol reducing drugs and here’s why. Cholesterol only sticks to the parts of the artery that are damaged. If there is no damage, it doesn’t matter how high the cholesterol numbers are, there will be no sticking. On the other hand, if there is damage in the arteries, no matter how little cholesterol there is, it will stick where it is needed to protect the damage. People who are on cholesterol reducing drugs have heart attacks all the time. There’s probably a better way.
Now let’s talk about the kind of heart attack that kills all kinds of people, the cardiomyopathy heart attack. This one has absolutely nothing to do with cholesterol. You can have the cleanest and healthiest arteries in the world and still die from this one and here’s why.
The heart requires calcium for each beat. The calcium resides in the fluid that the cells are soaking in called “extrastitial fluid”. When the heart beats, there is an electrical charge caused by an imbalance in pH between the inside and the outside of the heart cells. The pH (acid / alkaline balance) is regulated by the calcium in the fluids inside and outside the cells. After the electric charge has caused the heart to constrict (pump out) the heart cell doors open and draw in the calcium rich fluid. The calcium flowing into the cells balances the pH with the calcium left outside the cells and the electric charge is released, thus the heart relaxes. The heart uses some of the nutrients in the fluid and then blows the fluid back out. The new imbalance of having more calcium outside the cell than in, causes the electric charge to come back and the heart constricts again. This is how the heart beats and gets its nutrients.
Here’s what happens when a person has a cardiomyopathy heart attack. The body is so deficient in calcium that it doesn’t have enough to regulate the pH balance in the heart cells. When the heart draws the calcium in from the fluid, there isn’t enough calcium left in the fluid outside the cells to neutralize the electrical charge and the heart stays in the constricted position. This is when they use the defibrillator, which hits the heart with super high voltage. The idea is that the high voltage will release the electric charge that is holding the heart hostage. It often works, but if no new calcium is introduced to the extrastitial fluid, the heart attack will immediately reoccur.
Anyone who is deficient in calcium can have a cardiomyopathy heart attack, and when you hear about a young or healthy person dying from one, this is the kind that killed them.
When I learned this I thought, how fantastic, all we have to do is make sure everyone gets some good quality calcium and poof, we eliminate the most prevalent form of heart attack! Research done in the 1980s at the Mayo Clinic confirms my theory. They gave 10,000 heart attack victims a shot of calcium directly in the heart as soon as they entered the hospital. 80% of the victims’ hearts started pumping immediately after receiving the shot, the other 20% did not respond because they were dead on arrival.
If we’re going to tell you to take calcium, we must tell you what kind works and what kind doesn’t. The kind of calcium that your body can use is called biological calcium. This means it has been absorbed from the soil by a living plant before you got it. This includes coral calcium, sea calcium, algae calcium, plant calcium, and hydroxyapatite, which was absorbed by a plant and the plant was eaten by an animal. They usually get hydroxyapatite from the bones of cows and/or sheep.
The forms of calcium that don’t work are calcium carbonate (the calcium in soil) and chelated calcium, which is calcium carbonate with an additional molecule of something like acid or protein wrapped around it. Chelated calciums are the ones with an “ate” at the end, like calcium citrate or calcium aspartate.
Now for the record, there is nothing wrong with these forms of calcium, but if the human body was meant to absorb soil minerals, we could just eat a pound or two of dirt everyday and be as healthy as can be. Eating dirt isn’t bad, but it’ll only get you so far. You’re much more likely to stay healthy if you eat God’s plants and animals instead.
There are lots of companies that make quality biological supplements so be discerning but not concerned. When it comes to taking calcium, if it’s biological, it will come with a large list of other minerals. If it’s just calcium or just a couple minerals (like calcium & magnesium), it’s chelated.
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