Any change in your normal routine or health is called stress. If you look around, one of ten people that you see at work get stressed at some time or the other. Scientists are of the opinion that stress causes certain chemical changes in the brain which adversely affects your health. Women are very vulnerable to stress due to hormonal changes. There are certain negative effects on your health. Have a look at the different effects that stress has on your health.

1. Behavioral effects: When you are under pressure, your behavior changes to worst. You incorporate bad and harmful habits like smoking and drinking as a way of getting immediate relief from stress. Others who are too much busy with work, may not exercise daily or eat regularly. They may also cut down on sleep to cope up with their work pressure. All these are likely to harm your health.

2. Leads to heart disease: There is a strong link between stress and heart disease. If the stress is intense and if the stress hormones are not used up by physical exercise, our heart rate raises. This puts tension in the arteries and causes damage to them. As the body cures this damage, the artery walls thicken which can lead to less amount of blood flow to the heart.

3. Loss of immunity: Too much of stress leads to loss of immunity. It damages the immune system to a considerable extent which is why you catch cold more when you are stressed. It also leads to headaches and irritable bowel symptoms. Doctors are of the opinion that stress may also lead to cancer.

Regular exercise can reduce the amount of stress and the harm that it causes to your health. This strengthens your heart and increases the blood flow to the heart. This helps you to become immune to diseases and lead a healthy life.

We have been advocating the consumption of broccoli sprouts for years because of its Sulforaphane content – so at last the medical and scientific world is catching up at last. Most people can’t be bothered with growing their own sprouted seeds so elect to buy supplements containing (or purporting to contain) broccoli sprout extract but that’s not always easy to see beyond the marketing and understand what you’re seeing on the label.

This article appeared in the Express on Saturday 5 September 2009 and guess what sold out in most supermarkets – broccoli – not that the broccoli they bought will do much good. It just shows how eager people are to be healthy. In the coming weeks we’ll do some articles about broccoli sprouts and where they are being used to great effect. We will also make our recommendations about which brands of supplements are worth using and how to grow broccoli sprouts for yourself.

EATING broccoli could help prevent heart attacks and strokes, research has revealed.

The superfood is rich in a chemical that boosts a natural defence mechanism that protects arteries from disease.

Scientists say they are closer than ever to understanding just why the vegetable, already thought to protect against cancer, is so good for us.

And they believe that broccoli and other brassicas, such as cabbage and Brussels sprouts, could actually slow the progression of existing disease. The research at Imperial College London, funded by the British Heart Foundation, discovered the effect of sulforaphane, which is also present in kale, cauliflower, bok choy and rocket.

Treatment with the compound switched on the protective effect of a protein called Nrf2 which reduces swelling in areas of arteries most prone to disease.

This cut the risk of atherosclerosis – the thickening of the artery walls which can lead to angina, heart attack and stroke.

Dr Paul Evans, of the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College, who led the research team, said: “We found that the innermost layer of cells at branches and bends of arteries lack the active form of Nrf2, which may explain why they are prone to inflammation and disease.

“Treatment with the natural compound sulforaphane reduced inflammation at the high-risk areas by ‘switching on’ Nrf2.

“Sulforaphane is found naturally in broccoli, so our next steps include testing whether simply eating broccoli, or other vegetables in their family, has the same protective effect. We also need to see if the compound can reduce the progression of disease in affected arteries.”

Packed with vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants, brassicas are widely regarded as the powerhouses of the vegetable kingdom. They also include swede, turnips, cress, kohlrabi and mustard.

Professor Peter Weissberg, medical director of the BHF, said: “These fascinating findings provide a possible mechanism by which eating vegetables protects against heart disease.

“As well as adding evidence to support the importance of eating ‘five-a-day’, the biochemistry revealed in this research could lead to a more targeted dietary or medical approach to preventing disease.”

The full article is here

Take a moment to visualize rubbing a stiff brush repeatedly over soft skin until it becomes quite red and nearly bleeding. Let’s say you kept this up several times a day, every day for five years. If you could tolerate this painful brushing, you would have a bleeding, swollen infected area that became worse with each repeated injury. This is a good way to visualize the inflammatory process that could be going on in your body right now.

Regardless of where the inflammatory process occurs, externally or internally, it is the same. I have peered inside thousands upon thousands of arteries. A diseased artery looks as if someone took a brush and scrubbed repeatedly against its wall. Several times a day, every day, the foods we eat create small injuries compounding into more injuries, causing the body to respond continuously and appropriately with inflammation.

While we savor the tantalizing taste of a sweet roll, our bodies respond alarmingly as if a foreign invader arrived declaring war. Foods loaded with sugars and simple carbohydrates, or processed with omega-6 oils for long shelf life have been the mainstay of the American diet for six decades. These foods have been slowly poisoning everyone.

How does eating a simple sweet roll create a cascade of inflammation to make you sick?

Imagine spilling syrup on your keyboard and you have a visual of what occurs inside the cell. When we consume simple carbohydrates such as sugar, blood sugar rises rapidly. In response, your pancreas secretes insulin whose primary purpose is to drive sugar into each cell where it is stored for energy. If the cell is full and does not need glucose, it is rejected to avoid extra sugar gumming up the works.

When your full cells reject the extra glucose, blood sugar rises producing more insulin and the glucose converts to stored fat.

What does all this have to do with inflammation? Blood sugar is controlled in a very narrow range. Extra sugar molecules attach to a variety of proteins that in turn injure the blood vessel wall. This repeated injury to the blood vessel wall sets off inflammation. When you spike your blood sugar level several times a day, every day, it is exactly like taking sandpaper to the inside of your delicate blood vessels.

While you may not be able to see it, rest assured it is there. I saw it in over 5,000 surgical patients spanning 25 years who all shared one common denominator — inflammation in their arteries.

Let’s get back to the sweet roll. That innocent looking goody not only contains sugars, it is baked in one of many omega-6 oils such as soybean. Chips and fries are soaked in soybean oil; processed foods are manufactured with omega-6 oils for longer shelf life. While omega-6’s are essential –they are part of every cell membrane controlling what goes in and out of the cell — they must be in the correct balance with omega-3’s.

If the balance shifts by consuming excessive omega-6, the cell membrane produces chemicals called cytokines that directly cause inflammation. Today’s mainstream American diet has produced an extreme imbalance of these two fats. The ratio of imbalance ranges from 15:1 to as high as 30:1 in favor of omega-6. That’s a tremendous amount of cytokines causing inflammation. In today’s food environment, a 3:1 ratio would be optimal and healthy.

To make matters worse, the excess weight you are carrying from eating these foods creates overloaded fat cells that pour out large quantities of pro-inflammatory chemicals that add to the injury caused by having high blood sugar. The process that began with a sweet roll turns into a vicious cycle over time that creates heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and finally, Alzheimer’s disease, as the inflammatory process continues unabated.

There is no escaping the fact that the more we consume prepared and processed foods, the more we trip the inflammation switch little by little each day. The human body cannot process, nor was it designed to consume, foods packed with sugars and soaked in omega-6 oils.

There is but one answer to quieting inflammation, and that is returning to foods closer to their natural state. To build muscle, eat more protein. Choose carbohydrates that are very complex such as colorful fruits and vegetables. Cut down on or eliminate inflammation-causing omega-6 fats like corn and soybean oil and the processed foods that are made from them. One tablespoon of corn oil contains 7,280 mg of omega-6; soybean contains 6,940 mg. Instead, use olive oil or butter from grass-fed beef.

Animal fats contain less than 20% omega-6 and are much less likely to cause inflammation than the supposedly healthy oils labeled polyunsaturated. Forget the “science” that has been drummed into your head for decades. The science that saturated fat alone causes heart disease is non-existent. The science that saturated fat raises blood cholesterol is also very weak. Since we now know that cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, the concern about saturated fat is even more absurd today.

The cholesterol theory led to the no-fat, low-fat recommendations that in turn created the very foods now causing an epidemic of inflammation. Mainstream medicine made a terrible mistake when it advised people to avoid saturated fat in favor of foods high in omega-6 fats. We now have an epidemic of arterial inflammation leading to heart disease and other silent killers.

What you can do is choose whole foods your grandmother served and not those your mom turned to as grocery store aisles filled with manufactured foods. By eliminating inflammatory foods and adding essential nutrients from fresh unprocessed food, you will reverse years of damage in your arteries and throughout your body from consuming the typical American diet.

[Ed. Note: Dr. Dwight Lundell is the past Chief of Staff and Chief of Surgery at Banner Heart Hospital, Mesa, AZ. His private practice, Cardiac Care Center was in Mesa, AZ. Recently Dr. Lundell left surgery to focus on the nutritional treatment of heart disease. He is the founder of Healthy Humans Foundation that promotes human health with a focus on helping large corporations promote wellness. He is the author of The Cure for Heart Disease and The Great Cholesterol Lie.

http://www.totalhealthbreakthroughs.com/2009/02/heart-surgeon-admits-huge-mistake-part-2/

When you eat a meal high in saturated fats, it causes your arteries to narrow and stiffen. And although you may have the best intentions of shunning nacho cheese and bacon-wrapped hamburgers, everyone slips a little now and then.

So here are a few things you can do to minimize the impact of the nasty fats on your arteries.

• Eat a handful of walnuts. In a study, arteries stayed more relaxed when walnuts were added to a high-fat meal. They did an even better job than olive oil of helping blood to flow unrestricted. Researchers credit the alpha-linolenic acid in the nuts with helping keep arteries flexible.
• Take a walk a couple of hours after you indulge. Physical activity partly offsets the blood vessel dysfunction caused by eating a high-fat meal.
• Top off your meal with a tiny piece of dark chocolate, some hot tea, or a bit of pomegranate juice. These items are rich in compounds that help your arteries relax.

Source:  www.realage.com