A natural pathway to health and healing, integrating the use of natural ingredients and the use of supplements alongside traditional medicine for optimal health to empower you to live life abundantly and help you find your pathway to healing.

Topic 1: Heart Disease

Heart disease/CVD kills half the population, but the good news is we have made extreme advances in the prevention and treatment of these killer diseases.

Would you do something simple to help protect yourself? Exercising and eating a healthy diet are very important, but taking something in the natural can be a simple first step. If you have been diagnosed or have high risk factors, know that there are supplements that we can integrate with prescription medicines (and there are a lot of those) that you can take daily to decrease your risk of a heart attack.

One of the major problems involved in heart disease is blocked arteries - often due to high cholesterol and inflammation - which can cause a blood clot. The end result is congestive heart failure and death to the heart muscle.

Some natural compounds have cardiovascular benefits to support your body in preventing or overcoming blocked arteries. These include:

• Green tea – decreases bad cholesterol, increases good cholesterol, can inhibit calcium deposits (plaque) in the arteries. Drink 2-3 large glasses of unsweetened green tea, and can also be found in a concentrated extract.

• Arginine – a protein that relaxes and dilates the blood vessels. Found in nuts, poultry, fish and supplement form.

• Magnesium – also dilates the blood vessels and decreases blood pressure. Found in nuts and whole grains, but a supplement is recommended to get adequate amounts.

• CoQ10 – highly concentrated in the heart muscle, it increases the contraction ability of the heart muscle.

• Red yeast rice – has been used for centuries to treat heart/circulatory problems. It has a naturally occurring compound similar to cholesterol-lowering drugs, but without the risk of muscle pain and other side effects that come with the prescription medication. Red yeast rice actually has 8 other statin-like compounds that work to help lower cholesterol as well as an anti-inflammatory effect. It can only be taken as a supplement.

• Plant sterols – a cousin of cholesterol, it competes with “bad” cholesterol from being absorbed in the GI tract. The plant sterols are absorbed instead, and they do not block arteries or have the negative effects of cholesterol.

Taken all together, these compounds can help protect your heart by addressing many of the risk factors for heart disease - lowering cholesterol and blood pressure, decreasing inflammation, opening the arteries and strengthening the heart muscle. These have all been combined into our new Cardiovascular Support product.

This discussion will be continued in next week's program.

On another note, while the majority of doctors are in their healing field primarily to help people, unfortunately many are just not that knowledgeable about or supportive of supplements. This is because getting good studies on supplements is very difficult (for example, they use only one form of a vitamin which may not be the best form and therefore won’t give optimal results), and doctors often rely primarily on verifiable studies.