From Heart Health Claims to Cardiovascular Health Optimizing Nutrition

Take a stroll through any grocery store, and you may become overwhelmed by the dizzying array of heart healthy products. Cereals, soups, super-fruit drinks, popcorn and chocolate, salad dressings, margarines and oils, yogurts and nutritional bars, pastas and many other food categories have products proclaiming their ability to lower cholesterol and blood pressure, fight inflammation and control blood sugar levels —all factors in the development of cardiovascular diseases. No food or specific nutrient rules in the quest for the healthiest. “Low in sodium,” “low in saturated fat,” “no cholesterol and no trans-fats,” “high in potassium or high antioxidants”, “with plant sterols”, “an excellent source of Omega-3’s ,” and “contains cholesterol lowering fiber” are only some of the pronouncements. Walk over to the vitamin aisle and you will find numerous supplements with similar associations to heart health: CoQ-10, Vitamin E, psyllium, niacin and red yeast rice are just a few.

Many consumers remain dubious. See full article at The Kardea Gourmet.

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Vitamin D Deficiency-A Potential Role in Cardiovascular Disease Prevention

Inadequate levels of vitamin D are associated with an increase in the risk of cardiovascular disease and death, a new observational study has found. Dr Tami L Bair (Intermountain Medical Center, Murray, UT) reported the findings here at the American Heart Association 2009 Scientific Sessions.

Bair and colleagues followed more than 27 000 people 50 years or older with no history of cardiovascular disease for just over a year and found that those with very low levels of vitamin D (<15 ng/mL) were 77% more likely to die, 45% more likely to develop coronary artery disease, and 78% more likely to have a stroke than those with normal levels (>30 ng/mL). Those deficient in vitamin D were also twice as likely to develop heart failure as those with normal levels.

"We concluded that even a moderate deficiency of vitamin D was associated with developing coronary artery disease, heart failure, stroke, and death," said coauthor Dr Heidi May (Intermountain Medical Center). However, "it is not known whether this is a cause and effect relationship," she told heartwire. Because this study was observational, more research is needed "to better establish the association between vitamin D deficiency and cardiovascular disease," she noted.

Evidence so far suggestive of benefit of vitamin D

Vitamin D was the subject of much discussion in a general session on vitamins at the AHA scientific sessions. While there is strong evidence supporting the benefits of vitamin D in cardiovascular disease, there have been only a few randomized clinical trials, and previous observational studies "show no robust effects," said Dr Harald Dobnig (Medical University of Graz, Austria). The latter suffer from limitations, such as doses of vitamin D supplementation that are too low, low compliance rates, and short study duration, he noted.

There are some large randomized trials underway looking at outcomes with vitamin D; it is hoped that they will provide definitive answers in five to seven years, Dr Eric Rimm (Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA) explained.

"I think there's promise for vitamin D. We know that most people have insufficient vitamin D levels in their blood," Rimm says. "So although it will take five years until some of the trials that are adequately powered to look at cardiovascular disease with vitamin D will report, the epidemiology right now is suggestive that people should have 1000 or 2000 IU of vitamin D a day," he said.
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Kardea Nutrition, guided by the recommendations fo the National Cholesterol Education Program, enables each of us optimize the power of therapeutic nutrition to advance cardiovascular health, naturally and deliciously.

Major Study Looks to Nutritional Supplements & Heart Health

Boston researchers are launching a large, national trial of vitamin D and fish oil to see whether the dietary supplements reduce the risk of developing cancer or cardiovascular disease. They are also testing the idea that lower levels of vitamin D might explain higher rates of these diseases among African-Americans.

Boston researchers are launching a large, national trial of vitamin D and fish oil to see whether the dietary supplements reduce the risk of developing cancer or cardiovascular disease. They are also testing the idea that lower levels of vitamin D might explain higher rates of these diseases among African-Americans.

Dr. JoAnn Manson and Dr. Julie Buring, both of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, hope to enroll 20,000 healthy older people in the $20 million study funded by the National Institutes of Health.

One quarter of the participants will be black. The researchers believe higher rates of cancer, heart disease, and stroke among blacks, compared with whites, might be related to dark skin’s lower ability to make vitamin D from absorbing sunlight, and they want to establish whether taking vitamin D supplements could reduce or eliminate these disparities.

“African-Americans have a higher risk of vitamin D deficiency and a greater frequency of certain types of cancer and diabetes and hypertension, so I think that it will be of great importance to look at whether something as simple as taking a vitamin D supplement can narrow these health gaps,’’ said Manson, who believes the study is one of the first large-scale randomized trials to target a specific group at higher risk for a deficiency of nutrients. “It would be wonderful if something as simple as a vitamin D pill could narrow that health gap.’’

Women over 65 and men over 60 with no history of cancer or cardiovascular disease will be randomly assigned into four groups.

Some will take daily pills with about 2,000 international units of vitamin D and about 1 gram of fish oil. Others will take pills containing no active ingredients. In the two other groups, participants will get one of the supplements and one placebo. “I think it’s important to be cautiously optimistic and not jump on the bandwagon to take megadoses of supplements before a clinical trial helps to clarify their role.’’

Treatment will last five years. Participants will not need to travel to Boston because study forms and pills will be mailed, according to www.vitalstudy.org, the website for the study.

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Selected nutrients already have been found to promote cardiovascular health, notably plant sterol, soluble fibers from oatmeal, barley, psyllium and beans, and mono and polyunsatured fats in place of saturated fats. For more information on nutritional approaches to cardiovascular health, go to Kardea Nutrition. For heart health cooking recipes incorporating these key nutrients, go to Kardea Gourmet

Cardiovascular Disease: The Number 1 Killer of Women

So you think that cardiovascular disease is primarily a problem for men. Think again: More than 500,000 women in the U.S. die each year of cardiovascular disease, making it their No. 1 killer.

In fact, for a variety of complex reasons, the condition is more often fatal in women than in men and is more likely to leave women severely disabled by a stroke or congestive heart failure.

True, women don't usually start showing signs until their 60s--about 10 years after men first develop symptoms. And hormones seem to play a protective role in women before menopause.

But the common belief that premenopausal women are immune to heart problems is just plain wrong. Heart attacks strike 9,000 women younger than 45 each year.

The more scientists learn about a woman's heart and what can go wrong with it, the more they realize that females aren't just small males. There are subtle but important differences in how women's cardiovascular systems respond to stress, hormones, excess saturated fat and toxins like tobacco. There are also some pretty big differences in how aggressively doctors treat women with heart trouble--even in the emergency room when they are in most desperate need of help.

"The vast majority of heart attacks in women could be prevented with a combination of lifestyle modifications and medication," says Dr. JoAnn Manson at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. "Just making use of existing information could nearly eradicate the disease."

Of course, neither men nor women can do anything about their age or the genes they were born with. (If your father had a heart attack before 55 or your mother had a heart attack before 65, you should pay special attention to your heart health.) And it's still unclear why heart disease seems to strike men and women so differently. Structurally, their hearts and arteries are basically the same; women's hearts are smaller, but in proportion to their bodies. So doctors are pretty sure that any differences are matters of degree rather than kind.

Cardiologists are confident that they understand how heart attacks occur in men. The trouble usually begins when a fatty deposit or plaque, which has taken decades to build up on the inside of a coronary artery, becomes unstable and bursts, triggering a clot that blocks a blood vessel. Doctors can see these plaques during a fairly invasive procedure called an angiogram, in which a catheter is threaded through an artery in the groin or leg up to the arteries of the heart and a dye is then released to make any blockages easier to spot.

Although the research is controversial, some evidence suggests that bursting plaques may not be as important for women as for men. Doctors have long puzzled over the fact that some of their female heart-attack patients--usually those who have not yet gone through menopause--show few signs of artery-clogging plaques on their angiograms. Perhaps their blockages don't occur in the major arteries of the heart, where angiograms are performed and bypasses are most effective. Perhaps blood flow is restricted in the smaller vessels that branch off the coronary arteries. And perhaps the problem isn't plaques at all but the fact that these smaller blood vessels are somehow more prone to spasm, snapping shut at the slightest stress or trigger, cutting off the flow of blood to parts of the heart.

It's also possible that plaques--whether in the main coronary arteries or the smaller vessels--behave differently in women. Unlike men, women tend to distribute all the "garbage" associated with atherosclerosis--such as saturated fat and oxidized waste products--more evenly throughout the arteries. The process is analogous to the way men and women gain weight, says Dr. Noel Bairey Merz of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. "When men get fat, it all goes to their belly," she says. "When women get fat, they tend to get fat all over--fat at the ankles, fat in the sides, fat in the upper arms." So although women generally avoid the monster plaques that kill so many men in early middle age, the continuing buildup in women's arteries may come back to haunt them in their 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s.

Plaques are another reason for women to throw away their cigarettes, as smoking seems to turn stable plaques into unstable ones. "If you look at the plaque under a microscope, it doesn't appear to be the kind of plaque that can become unstable and rupture," says Dr. Robert Bonow of the American Heart Association. "But the surface has become eroded, exposing the material beneath the surface to the blood, which causes blood clots. And it turns out that the women who have this plaque erosion tend to be women who smoked." Those clots can travel through the bloodstream, wreaking havoc in the heart or the brain.

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