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Most people think that a heart attack has something to do with your heart.
Humans die from a lack of circulation rather than a problem with their hearts.
Your heart is an amazing muscle and usually does not fail, coronary arteries.
Your heart beats roughly 4,000,000,000 times in your lifetime without a break and is a muscle that has been refined over tens of millions of years. The heart needs its own blood supply. This is where a heart attack happens, in the blood supply.
First, you need to understand two opposing forces that are at work in your body right now.
Growth and Decay.
Biology tells us there’s no such thing as retirement or aging. There’s only growth and decay and your body looks to you to choose between them. Growth and decay have everything to do with managing inflammation in your body. If you understand how to mitigate inflammation you will have a much better chance to avoid a heart attack.
If what you’re reading becomes confusing always come back to two things: growth or decay.
Most people believe the body is just a thing, like an automobile or a kitchen appliance. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The body is made up of many different elements that break down over time and need to be rebuilt, over and over and over again for your entire existence.
Take this for example, muscle cells in your thigh are replaced day and night one at a time every four months.
Blood cells are replaced every three months.
Platelets are replaced every 10 days.
Your entire skeletal system is replaced with new bone every few years and your taste buds are replaced daily.
Your body is a very innate complex system, and these changes allow you to adapt to new challenges in the environment.
Also, older cells in the body tend to grow cancerous so hanging onto these old cells is not survival of the fittest.
We are destroying large parts of our body on purpose to make room for all the new growth.
The trick is to grow more than you throw out.
Your muscles control the chemistry of growth throughout your entire body. This is why people who exercise regularly not only move better and are stronger but they look physically younger. It’s no accident.
The nerve impulses that contract the muscles send a tiny signal to build it up, creating this moment-by-moment, chemical balance between growth and decay. These signals are sent to the rest of your body through your blood (circulation).
If enough growth signals are released at once they suppress the signals to atrophy or decay, and the body turns on the mechanism to build the heart bones, the cardiovascular system, your balance, your capillaries, and your muscles.
So exercise is the master signal.
It is responsible for sending hundreds of signals of growth every time you exert yourself and begin to sweat. Exercise starts the cycling of repair to strengthen the muscles and joints. Exercise is the foundation of positive brain chemistry, and it leads directly to a stronger immune system, better sleep, insulin regulation, a dramatic resistance to heart, disease, stroke, and hypertension, improved sexuality, repels Alzheimer’s, and depression, and decreased cholesterol if you let your muscle sit idle decay takes over again
Exercise as healthy stress
At high enough intensity, you drain your muscles and create some damage. You simply tear them down to build them up. This is called adaptive microtrauma and it’s critical to growth and health and it’s the signal to your body that it needs to repair the damage. It’s a signal to make the muscle cells, stronger and more efficient, and a little younger.
Here’s how it works.
Signs in the muscle cells leak into your bloodstream where they start a powerful chain of inflammation white blood cells rush to begin the demolition. Think about the same crew you want to demo your kitchen or bath, they rip out old walls down to the original studs.
Most people think that white blood cells just protect us from infection and cancer since they are part of the immune system. A big part of the immune system is to demolish the old decaying stuff so we can grow.
With the short-term stress of exercise, this process is very efficient. Once the demolition is done, growth and repair can begin.
For example, you can’t put in a new shower and drywall in your bathroom until all the old stuff is removed.
This is an important point.
In a healthy body, the demolition triggers this growth automatically.
Remember these two things
The challenge the body faces is to regulate inflammation to keep decay in a healthy balance with growth.
There are two super highways running throughout your body.
The bloodstream, especially plasma contains thousands of signals of information, controlling every aspect of your body, such as growth, decay, immune function, cancer, surveillance, fat, metabolism, sexuality, join health, all operate through the growth and repair signals through your plasma.
Here’s how it works. (Hang in there, we are going to get to the heart attack issue)
When muscle cells sense damage from exercise, they release chemicals to signal the start of repair. Some of these chemicals leak into the bloodstream and they draw white blood cells to the area. Think about the analogy of a drop of blood in the ocean that a great white shark could smell miles away.
After the demolition is completed by the white blood cells, the slate is clean and ready for the growth part of the cycle.
This is the new chemistry of aging and how we can use it to our advantage.
Proteins that control information are called cytokines they turn on and off every metabolic pathway in every cell. Each tissue has its own specialization and they interact with each other to control growth indicating the without the body.
There are hundreds of different types of cytokines but keep it simple. We stick with just two
The two master chemicals, responsible for growth indicated in every cell of the body are C6 and C 10.
C6 is the master chemical for inflammation and decay
C10 is the master chemical for repair and growth
C6 is produced in the muscle cells and bloodstream as a response to exercise.
C10 is produced in response to C6.
Let’s take a closer look at how the benefits of exercise can change your life
There are 660 muscles in your body, which is a massive holding tank of C6 and C10.
Think about it as a reservoir of youth waiting to be opened if you just do your part.
Exercise triggers growth by producing C6. For example, take a marathon runner or triathlete, and by the end of the race they have about 100 times the level of C6 than at rest. This immediately triggers how much repair will be needed.
The simple equation is this:
How much exercise equals how much inflammation equals, how much growth and repair or how much C10 will be released
This C10 is the key to growth and what we’re after. The actual process of how C10 grows and repairs your body is very complex. On the flip side, the demolition is a very simple process, so we focus a little bit more on the demo process, but you will feel and see how C10 will benefit you moving forward
Inflammation controls growth
At rest, only 20% of blood flow moves through your muscles, and with exercise depending on the intensity duration, 60 to 70% of blood flow begins to circulate through your muscle tissue.
As you exercise, your blood picks up C6 from the muscle and delivers it to every part of your body, every part of your body, especially your arteries After your body becomes bathed in C6, it then waits for the rebuilding bath of C10. That is the balance we are looking for when we’re exercising good decay equals growth
However, it’s important to know that not all decay is good. C6 doesn’t always produce the benefits of C10.
Here’s how to avoid it. When we are sedentary there is a slow steady drip of inflammation (C6) in the background. However, there’s not enough to turn on C10.
It’s like a faucet dripping in the middle of the night. You can barely hear it, but it’s always there. This is the steady drip of C6 to all parts of your body with no C10 growth to counter it. It’s just decay.
No matter what we do, as we age, we secrete a little more C6 in the background every decade.
The dripping faucet becomes more steady.
The brain is affected here as well. Chronic emotional stress also creates a slow drip of C6, whether that’s a combination of boredom, apathy, loneliness, or not learning new skills or tasks.
The good news is this can be removed with exercise and filling up your life with purpose. If you have both you put yourself in a much better position, but we’ll just stick to exercise for right now.
Take this large-scale study of 10,000 men who took two stress tests, five years apart. The fittest men had 1/3 or less mortality than the least fit. Those who were not fit at the first test and more fit at the second test turned the tide around and had half the mortality rate.
For every minute, the men went longer on the second stress test the reduction in mortality, decreased by 8%.
Arteries are one part of our body that is exposed to C6 all of the time.
In nature, arteries never clogged or burst. However, in modern life, our arteries have been exposed to the inflammation and decay of C6 for decades.
In response, they become weak and inflamed. White blood cells enter the walls ripping down all plumbing as an afterthought absorbing cholesterol as they do this.
This is what kills you, the afterthought absorbing of cholesterol.
In nature, there is no fat or cholesterol to be absorbed in a mammal’s arteries. You are stressed from starvation or little food. This decay or stress is only temporary until you find food or you die.
C6 brings along white blood cells to the walls of the arteries. When you combine chronic stress with a bad diet of processed food, the white blood cells turn into micro-vacuum cleaners and begin to take the fat out of our bloodstream.
They become so enlarged and inflamed they are called something completely different, foam cells.
The walls of the blood vessels fill up with all the junk in a demolition project that has gone bad and is lumped up in a glue of fat and cholesterol. This goop looks like the coating on a cheesy pizza.
Over decades this cheesy goop turns hard into plaque. It’s the plaque that kills half of us.
Blood comes into the heart from two arteries that come off of the aorta, they are about the size of a strand of hollow spaghetti. If one part of that strand dies. Part of the heart dies and there’s a heart attack.
If it wasn’t for tissue rejection, a human could live with the heart of a dog, cow, deer, pig, or bamboo.
What does exercise do for the heart?
Not as much as you would think, but it works magic for our circulatory system, and it’s the failure of our circulation that kills us.
As we age the heart remains pretty much the same. It’s the arteries that change.
Even “healthy” 50-year-olds have a coating of the goop mentioned above on their arterial walls.
Let’s assume you’re 50 years old and have a coding along the inner lining of your arteries. This would be a sub-clinical blockage
You go in for a stress test and it’s normal but you won’t be able to send the blood to everywhere it needs to go. So you have a steady dose of C6 and no C10. The coating of plaque on your arterial walls grows a little thicker.
The coronary arteries are embedded on the outer surface of your heart. Both of them go along for the 4 billion beats your heart delivers.
They also become sort of coiled and twisted into half of their size and length and then extended to full capacity 80 times per minute The walls are very pliable and can take a lot of stress.
But as the plaque begins to build up on the inside, they become weaker, harder, and less pliable hence the term, hardened arteries.
As the plaque becomes larger and stiffer on the inner wall, a piece of the plaque cracks, and a microscopic nick occurs on the inner wall of your artery.
Think of it as a very tiny shaving nick from a razor blade. That little nick causes a very tiny amount of blood to start oozing. This blood carries contaminated cholesterol to leak into the bloodstream.
As the crack grows, white blood cells rush in. Remember they are already enlarged with fat and cholesterol.
This begins to cut off more blood flow to that part of the artery which supplies the heart with blood. As a result, that part of the heart muscle begins to die and you have a heart attack.
A circulation problem, not a heart problem.
The more inflamed your blood is the bigger the plaque buildup. The bigger the plaque build-up, the more likely it is to crack.
This is consistent with people who are sedentary, angry, or living an isolated lifestyle.
There are two ways out of the situation.
Cardiovascular disease decreases dramatically with diet and exercise. Most cancers are immune-inflammatory lifestyle diseases just like heart attacks. Steady drip of C6 again.
Exercise regulates the chemistry in your blood to change the chronic signals of a sedentary life and replace them with signals to grow, heal, and recover.
Remember half of your body is muscle. When you get moving you get to release C10 into your blood and your blood goes everywhere, especially flowing to the inner walls of your arteries. The bottom line, exercise reverses the chemistry of decay.
The concept of this post was formulated from the Book Younger Next Year, by Chris Crowley and Dr. Henry S. Lodge.