Cardiovascular disease has steadily increased over the past century. Before that, it was hardly even heard of. Stroke and heart attacks are among the serious consequences of poor cardiovascular health. While for some, the recovery is quick, for others, they never recover their full mental or physical abilities. The good news is that there are steps we can take to protect our cardiovascular health and strategies to aid in recovery if you’ve experienced a stroke or heart attack.
Prevention is key. By the time you know you have cardiovascular disease and are at risk of a stroke, you’re already in trouble. Your body has stolen resources from other organs and tissues, trying to rescue a life-sustaining system, and has run out of those resources.
Since your body is continually destroying old, senescent cells, and rebuilding new cells to replace them, you have to be sure you have the building blocks necessary for that repair and replace mechanism to work. Every day, if you aren’t providing quality minerals, healthy fats and proteins to make new cells, your body is either going to make a sub-standard cell, or no new cell at all. Your cells have a pre-programmed cell death. You can’t stop that mechanism – every day your body attempts to replace the ones that just died. But it can’t make something out of nothing. If you don’t have the “ingredients” necessary to make a new cell, it won’t work right. If you forget the leavening in bread, for instance, you’ll get flat bread. In relation to a cell, that means a less-than-fully-functional cell! That’s no good. The definition of degeneration is when you are breaking down faster than you’re rebuilding. You MUST supply the needed nutrients!
You also have to eliminate things that will hamper the health of your cardiovascular system. Sugar consumption is one of the premier actions if you want to destroy your cardiovascular health. Any inflammatory foods, such as fast foods, processed foods, seed oils, excessive alcohol, coffee and for some, gluten, as well as sugar, can contribute to loss of cellular health.
This breakdown in the system means that your blood vessels will be weaker, your cholesterol rises in an effort to repair vascular damage, causing thickening of the blood and hypertension (sugar, dehydration and high triglycerides also thicken blood). These spell the perfect formula for a stroke or heart attack to occur.
Strokes and heart attacks don’t just happen for no reason, and they take years to develop, even if you have no awareness the degradation is occurring. That’s why prevention is key.
If you’re at the other end, it’s already happened, repair and restoration of function becomes vital. Just as you need minerals, good fats and quality proteins to protect from CV damage, you also need them to repair the damage and restore function. You can heal from this!
©2025 Holly A. Carling, O.M.D., L.Ac., Ph.D.
