14 Bad Habits That Can Destroy Your Heart

Today we're going to talk about the 14 bad habits that can potentially ruin your heart. Let's get to number one. Believing everything you read on labels. Let's start off with this one right here. Corn oil. How can this be heart healthy? What in here helps your heart? This is industrial processed seed oil that has been highly refined, and apparently this stays on the shelf for a long time. Do you realize that an average person consumes eight of these every year? That's like between 25 and 30 percent of our calories. This is a gallon. And this is supposed to be healthy for our heart. Here's another one that's healthy for your heart. Instant oatmeal. You're talking a lot of sugar in here. And it said heart healthy. And here we have another one. Honey and nut Cheerios. Just different combinations of ingredients, including sugar. I like this. Grandma makes my heart happy. That's good marketing. Both seed oils and these whole grains are high in omega-6. And omega-6 is pro-inflammatory. It creates inflammation. And on top of that, they're going to add all this extra sugar and refined starches. I highly doubt it's going to lower your cholesterol. In fact, it may just increase your cholesterol. But I think you should personally just consume and then retest your cholesterol and see what it really does. All right. Number two. Stay out of the sun. Use suntan lotion. Sun can cause cancer. Stay away from it. Well, this is going to reduce our vitamin D, thereby increasing our risk for heart attacks by roughly 32% based on a study that I'm going to put down below. In fact, one of the best remedies for high blood pressure is vitamin D. So avoiding the sun is not a good idea. Let's get to number three. Excessive sitting or a sedentary lifestyle. There's a fascinating study that shows an increased risk of heart disease by 147%. And not only heart attacks, but strokes as well. Now, if we compare sedentary people versus people that exercise, sedentary people have an increased risk of dying from a heart attack by over 50%. Exercise improves your fitness. That's that extra buffer, that extra resource to help you cope with stress and live longer. Number four. The overuse of certain medications. Sometimes we normalize medications. It's normal to be on medications over the age of 50. We don't tend to look at the side effects as much because everyone's on medication and your doctor told you to take medication, so it must be fine. But even over-the-counter medications can increase your risk of getting heart attacks by over 50%. I mean, there's so many medications that stress the heart. Chemotherapy will definitely increase the risk of getting a heart attack, and especially HRT, hormone replacement therapy, can increase the risk of getting heart attack by 29%. So work with a doctor that's open to using alternative forms of remedies for various conditions. Number five. Snacks, especially the late-night snacks, especially if they're carbohydrate snacks. I used to do this on a regular basis. I loved chips. I would do ice cream. And that snack before bed ruined your ability to burn any fat through the night. You burn most of the fat when you're sleeping if you don't eat anything, but that doesn't happen if you eat something before you go to bed, especially if it's carbs. Also, growth hormone spikes mostly at night. So growth hormone is the anti-aging hormone. It helps burn fat, and it'll be nullified when you eat these carbs before bed, unfortunately. So don't eat any snacks between the meals and especially after dinner. Number six. Drinking a lot of water but also at the same time being on a low-salt diet. What you're doing is you're diluting a very important electrolyte called sodium. What might happen is you might develop a condition called hyponatremia, which is low sodium in the blood. Hyponatremia actually can cause a heart attack, swelling in the brain, and all sorts of side effects. All the water is going to create a lot of pressure on the kidneys and the heart because your body has to get rid of the water, and then you end up being dehydrated because you don't have the salt to retain that fluid. The thing to do if you're salt sensitive is not to necessarily decrease sodium but to increase potassium. Potassium will protect you against any dangers of sodium. All right. Number seven. Ignoring dental care. Believe it or not, in certain studies where they dissect the plaque in the arteries, they have found in that plaque dental bacteria. Now, what is this bacteria from your mouth doing in your arteries? Well, there's something called gum disease. We can develop infections underneath the teeth, especially if you had a root canal and there's a lot of lymphatic tissue down there, and then that can leak into the lymphatic system, get into the blood supply, and it can circulate throughout the body. The last thing you want to do is create an infection underneath the tooth that's very, very difficult to identify. These infections underneath the teeth can actually eat up your bone, and you have to do a special 3D x-ray to identify necrosis of the bone. All coming from an infection. Number eight. Mouth breathing. That's a bad habit, and I'm talking mainly when you're sleeping. You should really practice breathing through your nose. Now, why is this so important? There's a physical phenomenon that's called the Bohr phenomenon, where you're breathing in oxygen, okay, but that oxygen that goes into the red blood cell cannot be released unless you have a certain amount of CO2. So this is why when you hyperventilate and you get all this oxygen and you go into a panic attack, breathe into a paper bag. Why? So you can get more CO2 to allow the oxygen to go into the tissues. So by nose breathing, you're actually adding more CO2. It might feel like you're getting less oxygen, but you're actually getting more oxygen when you breathe through your nose because you're mixing more CO2. Some people get this little tape that you can put on your mouth. That's available too. But nose breathing can greatly enhance your ability to sleep. It can help with sleep apnea. It can also help with snoring. Number nine, microplastics. Now, you can be exposed to a lot of microplastics from many different sources, consuming water in plastic bottles that are especially heated, plastic chemicals on the inside of certain cans. They're now finding that an average person has a lot of these microplastics, very tiny pieces of plastic, in their blood. Where is all this plastic coming from? Well, it's coming in our food supply because a lot of the plastics get into the soil. There's a lot of microplastics in the ocean, but a lot of these plastics don't get filtered out, unfortunately. Number 10, feeling out of breath very easily when you start to exercise. Let's say you've been exercising for a while and you're exerting yourself and you get out of breath super easy. You have an intolerance for exercise. This is a classic sign of congestive heart failure. There's something wrong with the heart that you need to evaluate. Don't ignore that. Number 11, jet lag, which greatly affects your sleep cycles. Also, a lot of people, when they fly, their ankles or their body starts filling up with fluid. So they start getting fluid retention and they get this huge expansion on their feet. So if you do fly frequently, what you should do is you should be taking niacin. Niacin helps to support the mitochondria. It's a very, very important nutrient. It's vitamin B3. I would recommend taking about 250 milligrams every day, at least. Make sure you take the one that creates the flushing. Sometimes you have to start with a smaller amount and gradually increase it. Another thing to take with jet lag is higher doses of vitamin D3. About 20,000 I use of vitamin D3. Before you started flying, you would find the jet lag being a lot less because vitamin D3 helps to readjust the circadian rhythm regulation. Number 12, excessive cardio without enough rest. When you exercise, a type of exercise that's really hard on the body is this sustained pulse rate exercise. You are just bringing the pulse rate up and you're sustaining it over a period of time. The point is that it can create extra stress on the heart. This is why you see a lot of these runners who look like they're in shape. They have problems in their arteries. And so if you are a runner, it's called a CAC test. It stands for coronary artery calcification score. It's not that expensive. It's very valuable in predicting your overall mortality. Number 13, secondhand smoke. Secondhand smoke can also be a problem because you're not usually, you know, you don't have a filter in your mouth. You're just getting it. That can actually increase your risk of getting a heart attack by 25 to 30%. And this is probably because it decreases oxygen to the body, not to mention all the chemicals. There's over 7,000 different chemicals when you smoke and 70 of them are carcinogenic. So avoid secondhand smoke and also firsthand smoke. Number 14, refined foods. Out of all the nutrients that are super important for the heart, magnesium is at the top of the list because number one, most people are not getting enough magnesium from their diet and they're eating things that are depleting magnesium. And it's virtually impossible to test accurately your magnesium levels. You can't rely on the blood test. 99% of your magnesium is not in the blood. Most of it is inside the cell. Magnesium is involved in 300 different enzymes, especially in helping you sleep, lowering your risk for cramping, as well as decreasing your risk for arrhythmias and also preventing calcium building up in the heart. One really simple way to lower blood pressure is to take not just vitamin D3, but magnesium with it. Good habits you should also add to this, cold showers or even cold immersion produces so many positive changes. Watching comedies, laughing more, all of these things are super important in lowering stress and improving sleep. Now, since we're on the topic of cardiovascular function, if you have not seen this video on heart health, you should check it out. I put it up right here.