Heart health is the number one concern most people have once they get older, as Western diets and lifestyle seem to harm our hearts the most. Between blood pressure issues, low platelet counts, cholesterol, low iron, arrhythmia, and heart attacks, there seems no end to the problems that can occur when the heart is unhealthy.
But is mastering your own heart health really that difficult? Not at all. If you have the right guidance on lifestyle and diet, you can ensure your heart is as strong as ever at any age.
Three Pillars of Heart Health
Heart-related medicine is a massive industry, but a largely artificial one. If we were all to follow natural diets and healthy daily routines, much of the heart health industry would collapse, because there would be no use for their products and services. The vast majority of heart ailments are avoidable. That is not exactly a secret, but it is important to have the right mindset and know the reality of your situation.
Not only are most heart problems avoidable, most of them are also reversible. And no, it doesn’t require expensive hospital treatments or dangerous medications.
The road to a strong heart rests in 3 simple lifestyle pillars, and if you follow them, you can treat and even heal a wide variety of ailments.
Increase Your Muscle Mass
Your muscle to fat ratio is extremely important in determining overall health.
A muscular body will encourage your heart to pump evenly and strongly. Studies have shown that it’s not so much that fat makes the heart weak, but the lack of muscle.
In nature, animals naturally train their hearts because they are constantly moving and performing resistance and weighted exercise. This “animal strength” can be seen even in the smallest animals. Anyone who has ever tried to hold a cat or groundhog that doesn’t want to be held can testify – even the smallest animals seem to have uncanny strength for their size. This is because they are constantly working their muscles.
Natural muscle strength is one of the keys to a healthy, functioning circulatory system. It is also one of the keys to losing weight and keeping it off. If you suffer from being overweight or obese, you shouldn’t focus too much on just “burning fat.” That is not how nature works.
Instead, focus on building muscle. You have to do more than run around to make your heart healthy and gain muscle. Begin lifting weights and performing more arduous exercises, such as pushups. The goal is to tear the muscle and have it rebuild itself stronger. You need that constant break down and rebuilding to be occurring in the body. Once this effect begins to snowball, your metabolism will increase and you will begin to naturally burn off your fat without having to go on convoluted diets or pills.
The other result will be that your heart will be stronger than ever, able to work much more efficiently.
The bottom line: an increase in muscle mass will put your body in a more natural, high metabolic state that will strengthen your heart and help you burn fat.
Cut Out Meat and Dairy From Your Diet
This one’s the biggie. If there had to be a “core pillar,” this one is it. In many ways this is also the tough pill to swallow for a lot of people. But it has to be said: meat and dairy are killing you.
It amazes me when I hear about heart attack patients and people with high blood pressure eating more of the same food that made their body’s sick in the first place. Human beings aren’t designed to eat meat. Not only does it unnaturally raise the acidity of our bodies, forcing our cells to leech minerals from our bones just to maintain equilibrium, but the fats and proteins that are in meat, especially beef and pork, cannot be properly digested by humans.
Clogged arteries, osteoporosis, heart attacks, liver failure, cancer: this stuff doesn’t come from bananas and broccoli. It comes from pork chops and cheese. If you ever want to get your heart back to a healthy state, heal your body, get off the medications, and escape the nightmare of living with high blood pressure, diabetes, and other illnesses, you absolutely have to change your diet. There’s just no way around it.
Human beings are meant to be a primarily fruit-eating species. Processed foods, meat, dairy products, have no business being inside of our bodies. Unlike true carnivores and omnivores, we lack the digestive juices, the intestines, and the cells, to break down animal protein and utilize animal-based nutrients. Our bodies can make do with it, but the same can be said for any animal. Even a pure herbivore, like a deer, if starving to death will resort to eating meat if it can find it.
This behavior we have is actually a holdover from our distant ancestors that found themselves without food and had to turn to desperate measures to survive. It’s not a natural, sustainable behavior for a fruit-eating ape species such as ourselves.
A whole-food plant-based diet full of primarily fruits and vegetables will first and foremost complement your metabolism and help you lose excess fat. It will reignite the “furnace” of your digestive system and will enable your cells to absorb optimized vitamins and minerals and begin repairing and reconstructing your body.
Remember, we literally are what we eat. Every bit of your body is created from the proteins, vitamins, and minerals we consume with our food. If all you are consuming is dead nutrients and acidic animal materials that our bodies consider to be second-rate and third-rate garbage, that is what your body will reflect.
One of the biggest issues with eating meat and dairy is simply that we cannot make use of the nutrients. Outside of caloric value they are virtually useless.
Think about it like this: one of the biggest heart and blood related issues in the West is low iron. There are tons of iron supplements all over the market. But here’s the problem: The United States is one of the biggest consumers of meat in the world, if not the biggest. The typical American consumes tons of meat, all day, every day. Even the poor eat meat on a regular basis, unlike in other countries where meat is more of a treat for the wealthy.
So if eating meat was good for your blood, good for your iron levels, wouldn’t it stand to reason that we would have off-the-charts blood health in this country? Shouldn’t we all have healthy iron levels compared to poor countries where eating meat is less common? Well, that simply isn’t the case.
It’s because our bodies are not designed to extract the iron from animal products. We biologically evolved over the course of tens of millions of years to derive our iron from leafy vegetables and a few fruits. That’s what our cells know how to do. Not all nutrients are created equal for all animals. Just because something might have “60% of the recommended amount” of iron in it, doesn’t mean our bodies can absorb and use that 60%. For most meat products, it’s more like 6%, if that.
Switching to a plant-based diet will allow your body to absorb the proper nutrients and actually power your cells the way they were meant to be. This means every aspect of your body will flourish, because you will be getting what we call “optimized nutrition.”
Bottom line: eat a healthy diet consisting of primarily fruits and vegetables, and you will strengthen your body and lose excess weight, which means a happy heart.
Continually Detox Your Liver
Why would you focus on your liver if you want heart health? This is something your heart docs will never tell you: the intimate link between the heart and the liver.
The liver is our body’s waste treatment plant. Every day we ingest numerous substances our body can’t use, and that would be toxic if they remained in the body. The liver quarantines these substances and ensures that they go where they need to go. Oftentimes, some substances remain in the liver for long periods of time, or even build up indefinitely, because we were never biologically designed to regulate them.
When the body’s waste treatment system begins to “back up” and malfunction, even slightly, the entire system begins to shut down. This is because waste treatment is one of the fundamental aspects of living biology. Our cells cannot function properly in an environment of toxins.
If the blood has toxins and plaque in it, these substances go to the liver. The liver is what purifies our blood. Our lungs, spleen, and other organs also remove waste from our blood, but ultimately the issue here is that the typical Western diet and lifestyle compromises the liver. And if the liver is compromised, fewer and fewer toxins are removed from the blood. This means they build up in our arteries, cause heart defects, ruin our body’s ability to regulate blood health properly, and ultimately it leads to fatal complications.
You absolutely cannot have healthy blood with an unhealthy liver. Biologically impossible.
As you begin to eat a healthier diet, consider detox teas and other treatments, like activated charcoal, to slowly remove the built-up toxins from your digestive system, so that the liver can slowly recover and begin to act as a fully functioning waste treatment plant again. It’s important that you don’t rush into trying to cleanse the heart directly if your liver is compromised. The reason why toxins build up in the blood in the first place is because your body realizes that pushing such substances into your liver would damage it, because it is overwhelmed. This could cause sickness and toxic shock.
There are treatments, such as herbal chelation, that can help push toxins from the blood, but such treatments should only be done once you know your liver is in a better spot. This also means abstaining from alcohol, excess medication, and overly processed foods. Once you know that your liver is cleaner, you can choose an herbal remedy to assist your body in purifying your blood.
Note that a raw fruit and vegetable diet will, over time, naturally chelate and cleanse your blood, but herbal remedies can be effective in quickening the process.
Bottom line: ensure that your liver is healthy, so that it can perform its functions and purify your blood.
A Healthy Heart is Just a Lifestyle Change Away
Simple steps will lead to great results. A tweak to your lifestyle could mean the difference between heart failure and a healthy life.
Skip the silly aerobics classes and instead start lifting weights and tear some muscle. Cut out as much meat and dairy from your diet as possible and reduce your intake of processed foods. Eat raw fruit and vegetable smoothies whenever possible, as they are easy to make, taste great, and give us optimal nutrition. Start drinking a detox tea so your liver can flush its built-up toxins, and you can transform the state of your heart.
It might seem daunting, but after a few weeks, the feedback you get from your body will be worth it. No amount of medication can compete with an holistic lifestyle. Natural exercise, real food, and clean blood will do more for you than a thousand visits to the doctor.
Understanding that the key to health rests in our lifestyle decisions is the first step to escaping the revolving door of doctors visits and expensive medications. You have the power to reverse this trend and heal your heart, all it takes are small steps in the right direction.
The founder of Digital Sages, Matt has an extensive background in self-mastery and has authored several books on the subject. His goal is to demystify important esoteric subjects and help people transform their lives through self-awareness and personal empowerment.