Wednesday, December 4, 2019

Common Spice Cures Cholesterol and Heals Hearts




This powerful spice has been proven to lower cholesterol, improve blood pressure and inflammation, and even cure the common flu.
But you need to use it in a specific way or it’s basically useless.
A study published by PubMed showed that rats who get treated for 30 days with ginger extract had lower cholesterol levels as compared to the control groups.
Another study that utilized 85 patients of the Cardiac Disease Clinic, Babol, showed that those who received ginger lowered their cholesterol significantly more than a placebo group.
Ginger has also been proven to lower blood pressure, along with improve inflammation and almost all other markers of health.
What is the best way to use ginger?
Make your own tea from fresh ginger by slicing it thinly and let it steep in hot water. Optionally, add lemon and honey for taste and power.
Otherwise, you can also add fresh ginger to many meals. The root needs heat to release its healthy substances, so add it to your meal at the beginning of your cooking.
Unpeeled ginger can also be stored in your refrigerator for a long time, so it is easy to always have some of this delicious herb at hand at all times.
Furthermore, you can also use organic powdered ginger as an alternative or buy a ginger extract supplement in your local health food store.
But ginger is not the only thing that improves your cholesterol level.


Drink This Juice to Lower Cholesterol



Tomato Juice and Cholesterol

Many studies agree that this juice is fabulous stuff.
The science says it bestows such great cardiovascular benefits because it’s packed with carotenoids, calcium, and it also delivers a thunderbolt’s worth of vitamin A.
Tomato juice is great at reducing both cholesterol and blood pressure, so researchers wanted to test how great.
Researchers recruited 184 men and 297 women. A few suffered from high cholesterol and 94 had hypertension or pre-hypertension. Their average ages were 56.3 and 58.4 years respectively.
For a year, these participants were given as much unsalted tomato juice to drink as they wanted, but it doesn’t look like they were exactly clamoring for the stuff, because the average participant only got through about one cup a day.
But maybe they should have been guzzling it, because after one year of chugging tomato juice, their systolic blood pressure had dropped from 141.2 to 137.0 mmHg (millimeters of mercury) and their diastolic pressure from 83.3 to 80.9 mmHg. Those are averages, so they don’t show the even better news – that the people who started out with the highest blood pressure saw the biggest reductions.
125 of the participants had high cholesterol or high blood fats. Their LDL cholesterol, which is the bad stuff that poses the greatest heart disease risk, dropped from 155 to 149.9 mg/dl (milligrams per deciliter).
You might be thinking that these reductions don’t seem very impressive, but they are when you remember what caused them: drinking just one cup of tomato juice every day.

To be sure that tomato juice alone was the cause of their dramatic drop, the scientists had them fill out a questionnaire at the beginning and end of the study to make sure that nothing else about their lifestyles could have affected the outcome, so we know that the results are watertight.
This was the second time that this research team had looked at the effects of tomato juice. They also performed a 2015 study to see tomato juice might affect menopausal symptoms in middle-aged women, and they also happened to test their cholesterol as part of that.
In this one, they asked their 93 subjects to drink 200ml of tomato juice twice a day for eight weeks. This is a bit less than two cups per day.
Afterwards, 22 of the women with high triglycerides saw them drop substantially, and the ones with the highest scores at the start enjoyed the biggest falls.
Before you get too excited, the one big limitation in this study is that they didn’t gather enough detailed information about what the participants ate. This means we can’t know if the tomato juice was used to replace something unhealthy. If it replaced something sugary then that change alone might have been responsible for the health benefits, and not the tomato juice itself, but let’s not forget that the results are consistent with other studies, so it’s probably safe to assume that tomato juice really is that good for you!


Cholesterol and Eggs


Cholesterol and Eggs

Eggs are a fantastic source of protein and a great alternative to the usual selection of meats, but for the longest time they’ve picked up lots of bad press for their high cholesterol content.
Nutritionists and others have often warned against consuming more than 2 eggs per week, but are they really that bad for us?
It’s still not uncommon for someone to argue that eggs are unhealthy, but recent research done by the University of Grenada may have finally unscrambled all the misinformation about eggs.
The researchers found that serum cholesterol (meaning cholesterol found in the bloodstream) is not increased by consuming eggs—even for people who weren’t very active—and a far greater risk for raising your cholesterol levels is eating too many trans and saturated fats over the long-term.
In fact, if you sit eggs side-by-side with fried and processed foods, say the researchers, there’s just no competition. Eggs are miles better for you.
If you want to avoid anything then avoid red meat, because those with a meat tooth had the worst cholesterol numbers.
Eggs are nutritional powerhouses, which is hardly surprising when you consider what they were designed for. Nature packed in a lot to give chicks the best start in life, so as well as all that protein, they contain Magnesium, Vitamin A, potassium, and calcium, too.
They also feature choline, which is essential for optimal brain function, and two powerful antioxidants called lutein and zeaxanthin, which are also beneficial for keeping your vision healthy.

The Tasty Treat that Cuts Blood Pressure and Cholesterol

chocolate helps lower cholesterol naturally and quickly

Bad food tastes good. That’s part of the reason why it can be so difficult to beat conditions like high blood pressure and high cholesterol. It’s unfortunate that your cardiovascular health is not best friends with many of the sweet things in this world.
But if you do have a sweet tooth then we have some good news for you, because there is one fabulous feelgood food that tastes great and can still help your health.
It can help make your heart healthier, reduce your blood pressure, cut your bad cholesterol, ramp up your brain activity and even pep up your love life.
Well, it shouldn’t be too surprising that chocolate is healthy given that it starts life as cocoa beans, which are loaded with flavanol. Flavanol is an antioxidant, one of those Swiss army knives of health that stops blood clots, boosts blood flow to the heart and brain, reduces high blood pressure, and lowers the risk of heart attack and stroke.
But it’s not the only antioxidant that cocoa beans are choc full of. There are even more of these helpful substances which are so beneficial to vascular health, and which also take the fight to free radicals—the harmful molecules which contribute to oxidation in the body. Increased oxidation opens the way for LDL cholesterol—the bad sort—to start forming plaque on the arterial walls. As a result, they become narrower and more rigid, which is a perfect recipe for heart attack and stroke.

There are many things in the environment that can cause damage to the body, like pollution, cigarette smoke, and even too much sunlight, and antioxidants help to mop up the effects of all of them, before they can do their damage.
But it isn’t just the free radicals that help put chocolate on a par with health foods. There’s also the fat content. The majority of fat in chocolate comes from cocoa butter, which contains oleic, palmitic and stearic fatty acids (and you’ll find Oleic acid in olive oil too). It’s monounsaturated, which means it’s heart-healthy and a proven blood pressure reducer.
The palmitic and stearic fatty acids are saturated fats, but still, research has found that they don’t hurt your cholesterol levels, which is odd but welcome news!
It’s now well established that chocolate can lower stress levels and improve a person’s sense of well-being and happiness. This is probably down to the fact that it’s great at boosting the production of endorphins, the brain’s natural happiness chemicals. And you also get serotonin in the mix, the body’s own antidepressant, too.
It’s worth mentioning that the brain releases these happiness chemicals when we’re in love, so when people say that they love chocolate, they really do mean it.
The only fly in the ointment with chocolate is the high sugar content. That’s why we’d recommend dark chocolate over milk chocolate every time. Choose the dark stuff with at least 65% cocoa content. Current research leads us to believe that 3 ounces (85 grams) of chocolate a day will give you all of the health benefits without the sugar rush.
As good as chocolate is for you, it can’t handle the job of lowering your blood pressure all on its own. For that you’re going to need something else, and these 3 simple exercises are the answer to lowering your blood pressure down to 120/80 right away…

The ONE Oil That Heals Heart Disease



The one oil that heals heart disease and high cholesterol

This oil has been described as a miracle medicine for heart disease (and more).
But the scientific world has been mixed in their opinions.
Finally, a new study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association proves without a doubt that this cheap oil drastically reduces the risk of heart attack.
To ensure that their results were accurate, only randomized trials were carried out.
Researchers gave one group omega-3 supplements whilst the other group was given a fake supplement (placebo).
The results were interesting and quite contrary to previous studies.
It was found that people that took omega-3 supplements on a daily basis were 8 percent less likely to have a heart attack and coronary heart disease death, 5 percent less likely to have coronary heart disease, 7 percent less likely to die of cardiovascular disease, and 3 percent less likely to have cardiovascular disease. What’s more, the higher the dose of omega-3s, the lower the risk of any of the above events happening.
Strokes were the only thing they could not find an omega-3 benefit for.
While the researchers agreed that omega-3 supplements were great, they stated that eating fish and taking daily exercise were better. In short, omega-3 supplements are beneficial when it comes to living a heart healthy lifestyle thanks to its anti-inflammatory properties; they are even more effective when combined with a healthy diet and regular exercise.