How Heart Disease Hurts The Body
While it might be seem like beating a dead horse to list the effects of heart disease, knowing them reveals just how important it is not just to avoid the mother of all bad-day-makers, the heart attack, but to ensure that your heart is not just healthy, but strong and ready for the vicissitudes of a stressful western lifestyle.
The primary issue, when the heart's rhythm is disrupted, is oxygen delivery via the bloodstream, which is essential to pretty much every system in the body. Without oxygen, your muscles, brain and internal organs simply cease to function. When you breathe air into your lungs, a series of chambers deliver it into the bloodstream, where the pumping of the heart must deliver it at a sufficient rate to the rest of the body. Lack of energy amongst the elderly may be largely attributed to weakening of the heart (heart rate decreases from a healthy 60 - 80 resting bpm in your twenties to only 40 in your seventies). If your heart stops functioning properly, say goodbye to the proper functioning of everything else - despite western civilization's obsession with the brain, the heart might just as well be the resting place of the soul, and when it rests, so do you.
This is the reason for the use of domiciliary oxygen therapy is prescribed to patients with chronic heart failure. In fact, despite the focus on eliminating junk food and engaging in exercise as means of allaying heart problems, a recent study in Australia showed that in the case of COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease), the most common cause of chronic hypoxaemia on the continent, there were only two measures that reduced mortality rates: quitting smoking and supplementing oxygen intake.
The message remains clear - if you respect one part of your body, let it be your heart. Beating a spectacular one hundred thousand times a day, it's the hardest working manual laborer on the planet. Give it the food it needs to survive, don't pollute its world, and it will continue to turn the air that you breathe into nourishing food for all your body's systems.
While it might be seem like beating a dead horse to list the effects of heart disease, knowing them reveals just how important it is not just to avoid the mother of all bad-day-makers, the heart attack, but to ensure that your heart is not just healthy, but strong and ready for the vicissitudes of a stressful western lifestyle.
The primary issue, when the heart's rhythm is disrupted, is oxygen delivery via the bloodstream, which is essential to pretty much every system in the body. Without oxygen, your muscles, brain and internal organs simply cease to function. When you breathe air into your lungs, a series of chambers deliver it into the bloodstream, where the pumping of the heart must deliver it at a sufficient rate to the rest of the body. Lack of energy amongst the elderly may be largely attributed to weakening of the heart (heart rate decreases from a healthy 60 - 80 resting bpm in your twenties to only 40 in your seventies). If your heart stops functioning properly, say goodbye to the proper functioning of everything else - despite western civilization's obsession with the brain, the heart might just as well be the resting place of the soul, and when it rests, so do you.
This is the reason for the use of domiciliary oxygen therapy is prescribed to patients with chronic heart failure. In fact, despite the focus on eliminating junk food and engaging in exercise as means of allaying heart problems, a recent study in Australia showed that in the case of COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease), the most common cause of chronic hypoxaemia on the continent, there were only two measures that reduced mortality rates: quitting smoking and supplementing oxygen intake.
The message remains clear - if you respect one part of your body, let it be your heart. Beating a spectacular one hundred thousand times a day, it's the hardest working manual laborer on the planet. Give it the food it needs to survive, don't pollute its world, and it will continue to turn the air that you breathe into nourishing food for all your body's systems.