Tag Archives: heart health

Probiotic for your Heart?

Heart Health, , , , , , , , , , ,

fixitplan newsL. Reuteri – A probiotic that targets cardiovascular disease

As promised in the Progress Report I posted a few weeks ago, I want to tell you about something new we’ve learned.   It all started during Bill’s checkup in April last year when Dr. Crandall encouraged us to look into a probiotic for heart health.  Well.. you don’t have to ask me twice!  I researched it as soon as I got home, and Bill started taking it that very week.  It’s called Lactobacillus Reuteri 30242, or more commonly known as L. Reuteri.  It’s a specific strain of Lactobacillus–a friendly bacteria that lives in our bodies and is found in some fermented foods like yogurt. These friendly bacteria are also called probiotics.

fixitplan L. Reuteri for heart health
By Reyesangel3 (Own work) CC BY-SA 3.0

The American Heart Association reported this probiotic lowers bad (LDL) cholesterol and total cholesterol in people with high cholesterol.  In the study, a dosage of 100 mg taken twice daily was used, and after only 9 weeks total cholesterol dropped an average of 9.1% and LDL dropped 11.6% as compared to the study participants taking the placebo.

And so did Bill’s!  He began taking L. Reuteri in April in a dose of 2.5 Billion CFU (colony forming units) twice daily with food.  At the end of September his new lipid profile showed his total cholesterol had dropped 6.9% Continue reading Probiotic for your Heart? →

Progress Report~Fall 2015

Progress Reports, , , , , , , , ,

Bill Peterson fixitplan

Progress Report Fall 2015A B+ you say?  What?
Well I kind of expected it.

 

Life stuff over the summer caused some stress and a wavering in focus on our exercise program and even some on our diet.  And there’s the irony! Because when motivation suffers, we all know that exercise and eating well are the best things you can do to combat the blues and stressful life stuff!

We haven’t been terrible.. we didn’t completely fall off the wagon and abandon our healthy focus.  Still plant-based, mostly whole foods, avoiding sugar and so on, but too often our dinner meals were getting skimpy on the greens for example.IMG_20150422_140836

And the gym..  well.. sometimes talking about the stress stuff, or computer time on Bill’s photography passion gobbled up the day before we knew it and we’d miss the gym.  So we didn’t always get the cardio time we know we need.   And this seemed to lead 20150914_215036to staying up too late, a little too much late-night popcorn (no butter of course), along with broken sleep and wakefulness in the night.  So things have not been going as well as they had been.  Our daily routine just plain got out of whack. Continue reading Progress Report~Fall 2015 →

Nuclear Stress Test

Heart Health, , , , , , ,

Bill Goes Nuclear

It’s time to go beyond lab work and see how Bill  is doing with the lifestyle changes we put in place two years ago.  So here we are at the nuclear stress test lab, preparing for a followup with Dr. Crandall.

Nuclear Stress Test MonitorNuclear Stress Test… sounds kind of ominous, doesn’t it?  It goes by a number of different names but this one’s called nuclear myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI), and it will be done to assess the health of his heart as well as blood flow to the heart. After injecting a radioactive liquid called a tracer into his bloodstream, a series of heart pictures (32 in Bill’s case) will be taken with a special camera before and then again after exercise while his vessels are dilated to assess blood flow. As Bill’s nurse explained, “blockages don’t dilate.”  In his book, The Simple Heart Cure, Dr. Crandall writes, “the heart lights up like a lantern wherever there’s good blood profusion.  If an area of the heart remains dark, we know that blood isn’t flowing as it should.” Continue reading Nuclear Stress Test →

Powerful, Healthy Things ~ Love and Kindness

Stress, , , , , , , , ,

friend cardLast Monday,  a “heart healthy” card arrived in our mailbox!  Yes, there are such things.   The card was filled with all the warmth of a best hug, sent to us from dear friends.  It came at a good time, when we were both feeling anxiety and sadness over a recent event.  It made us think about the value in our lives and for our health of having close, loving relationships.  Suddenly the undercurrent of anxiety and sadness I felt was swept away and replaced with a warm feeling in my chest and a smile on my face.

We talk about stress and sadness and the damage it can take on our well-being in so many ways.  It raises blood pressure, exposes us to a constant and unhealthy barrage of stress hormones which stimulates inflammation, can cause irregular heartbeats, lead to depression, and so on.  But what we don’t talk about so much, Continue reading Powerful, Healthy Things ~ Love and Kindness →

SUPPLEMENTS FOR HEART HEALTH

Heart Health, , , , , ,
We receive a lot of emails with questions on this subject so let’s talk about it.
Bowl of Pills, Photo by rselph, CC BY 2.0
Bowl of Pills, Photo by rselph, CC BY 2.0

Bill and I for quite a while have been big believers in the benefits of supplements as natural alternative therapies.  Years ago when he was diagnosed with Rosacea, he didn’t want to go on the life-long regimen of antibiotics as prescribed, so we turned to supplements for help.  And it worked!  Another time I struggled with debilitating pain behind my left ear that progressed to a chronic level, sending me to various doctors which led to a possible prognosis of a brain tumor and a CT scan, which fortunately found nothing.  Then by chance we went out sailing for the day with friends and I took ginger every 3 hours to manage motion sickness (yes it works), only to be amazed at the end of the day that I had been pain free!  Apparently there was inflammation somewhere inside me (ah ha!) so I began a regimen of ginger for a period of time and the problem went away.  And on another occasion we reversed a serious eye condition with supplements, to the amazement of Bill’s eye doctor.  I’m a believer!

But think about this.  By definition, a supplement is:

“Something that completes or enhances something else when added to it.”

So the key word here is supplement–they are not a panacea.  Continue reading SUPPLEMENTS FOR HEART HEALTH →