Are trends towards heart disease reversible?
If you were to go to a doctor for a stress test and found that there was some partial blockage of the arteries in your heart, would improving diet and exercise (along with quitting smoking, in my father's case) reverse this? What I'm mainly curious about is whether this type of fat/calcium deposit can be lost just the same as body fat.
Heart Diseases - 7 Answers
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1 :
no I'm a doctor
2 :
Linus Pauling, who won the 1954 Nobel Prize in chemistry, advocated a regimen of vitamin C and lysine to reverse atherosclerosis.
3 :
It can be reversed by a life change. Diet, exercise... ~
4 :
I have never heard of actual plaque in the arteries dissappearing. I do know that some factors that cause heart disease can be changed to slow down or stop blockages from occurring. Factors that cannot be changed are genetics, sex, and age. Changing your diet to a low fat, low salt, high fiber diet, increasing exercise, stopping smoking, and reducing alcohol to 1 to 2 drinks a day or less can reduce the risks of heart disease and help slow or stop the growth of blockages. Smoking is very hard on arteries. The nicotine roughens up the walls of the arteries and makes it easier for blockages to occur.
5 :
Yes it absolutely can be reversed. The concentration camp victims in WWll with starvation were found to have no atherosclerotic plaques where normally they should have had them. The next best way now is to take statins as well as the cholesterol uptake blocker-Zetia. It selectively blocks the re absorption of cholesterol from the intestinal tract. This is probably the major source of excess cholesterol that gets into our system. If the cholesterol is down to 75-100 or near, there should at least be no further progression of the clogging. And quite possibly it could lead to some reversal of the problem.
6 :
Yes. What is needed is regular long cardio 45-60 minutes, at least somewhat intense, 5-6 days a week, and a much lower fat diet , and more fruit for anti-oxidants. The reversal process is slow, around 5% improvement a year. But that is far better than a more severe blockage. But a stress test may not detect it. It did not detect my 99% blockages 9 months before I needed a triple bypass. Body fat changes can occur much more quickly
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