Heart Healthy Solutions To Think About (Part 3 of 4)

Often times people die suddenly from cardiomyopathy disease complications. Every year between 75,000 and 100,000 athletes under the age of thirty die while exercising. We would think that athletes live a very heart healthy lifestyle. The tragic reality is that they don’t. No matter the level of competition, most athletes have a tendency to consume large amounts of fried foods or foods that are high in free radicals. Aside from vegetable oils and fried foods, two of most common causes of heart attacks are burnt meats and the deficiency of the trace mineral selenium. Burnt meats contain heterocyclic amines. According to , some heterocyclic amines found in cooked and burned meats are known carcinogens, which is the correct term for cancer causing agents. Research has shown that cooking certain meats at high temperatures creates chemicals that are not present in uncooked meats. For example, heterocyclic amines are the carcinogenic chemicals formed from the cooking of muscle meats such as beef, pork, fowl and fish.

Selenium is a trace mineral and strong antioxidant which is thought to protect our body from free radicals. You cannot guarantee that you’re going to get nutrients such as selenium out of your food so if you do not supplement you are playing Russian roulette with your health each day that you wake.

I will now present more facts concerning the relation of free radical consumption to declining heart health. In 1997 The Harvard School of Public Health did a study that showed that the people of the southeastern part of the United States have a lifespan that is shorter than the people in the upper Midwest region. Do you know how the people who live in the upper Midwest prepare their food? They eat most of their food stewed, roasted, boiled and poached. The people who live in the southeast part of the country (between Washington D.C. and East Texas) primarily eat fried foods such as fried fish, fried chicken, fried hush puppies, fried tomatoes, fried okra, fried potatoes and things of the like. The fried food is the reason that their average life span is twenty years shorter than those who live in the upper Midwestern part of the country.

To be specific, it is important that you stay away from all vegetable oils if you desire to keep your heart healthy. There are many health experts who recommend certain oils as being “ok to use”, but there are no oils that are safe to use unless they are taken in capsule form. For the sake of this conversation I will speak on the subject of which oils are less harmful than others. I realize that no individual is perfect and we all have an occasional craving for great tasting food, so we will examine which oils are the lesser of evils.