Easter Special: Fasting, or why a weight reduction is really good for the heart
Fasting is traditionally associated with the 40 days before Easter, during which believing Christians consciously renounce meat, alcohol, sweets or even plastic for 40 days from Ash Wednesday to Maundy Thursday. This time, gives the opportunity to reflect on established habits.
Fasting is increasingly becoming a health trend
Fasting is increasingly developing into a way of doing something for one's own health. A trend, which is meanwhile also widely known as therapeutic fasting and whose effectiveness has also been scientifically proven in numerous studies for all possible forms of illness.
But does fasting help also with heart diseases, circulatory diseases or even after a heart attack?
Basically in advance: Before patients with heart problems consider a fasting cure, you should always discuss this with your treating doctor. Besides the "if", this also applies to the "how?" and "how long?". Because the more advanced a heart disease is, the shorter and less intensive the fasting cure should usually be. Also, the way of fasting, e.g. over longer relief and build-up days or the calorie intake during the actual fasting cure, can vary.
Fasting can reduce the probability of coronary heart disease
If one takes this into account and discusses and plans a fasting cure with the doctor, it can even be used as a preventive measure against heart attacks. For example, researchers from the Intermountain Medical Center Institute in Murray (Utah) found out in an epidemiological study that periodic fasting reduces the probability of coronary heart disease.
In another study, this time based on the measurement of blood lipid values (HDL and LDL), the same researchers found that during fasting "good" HDL cholesterol values rose by six percent, and "bad" LDL cholesterol values by 14 percent. The body therefore produces both types of cholesterol during the fasting in order to use fat instead of glucose as an energy supplier. In the result thus during chamfered fat cells in the body are diminished, why also the probability for a diabetes illness and a coronary heart illness decreases.
Monitor your fasting through regular heart checks with CardioSecur.
Fasting cure sustainably improves heart health in overweight people
The positive effect on heart health is even more evident in the case of a fasting cure for overweight people. Studies show here that the heart performance of overweight people improves immediately when they lose weight. For example, cardiologist Sándor Kovács from Washington University (St. Louis) concluded in a one-year study of overweight but healthy men and women that their heart performance improved immediately when the subjects lost weight.
"Weight reduction therefore means an immediate improvement in heart health, and success is virtually guaranteed," promises Sándor Kovács.
Fasting for the thickening of the heart muscle
Whom a chamfering cure with food renouncement for days seems too violent or if the heart health does not permit such a radical step, that could offer itself soon with a "pretended chamfered" an interesting alternative, in order to use a calorie-reduced nutrition as therapy for the heart health. For this purpose, researchers from Graz have now imitated fasting with natural substances in order to prevent, delay or even reverse a thickening of the heart muscle.
The cardiologist Simon Sedej from Med-Uni Graz, who has been researching the cell mechanisms and metabolic changes responsible for heart muscle weakness for some time, believes that a calorie-reduced diet and the associated metabolic processes have a clearly positive effect on the heart. However, since, in his opinion, permanent fasting cannot be expected of every heart patient, the researchers are looking for substances that imitate the metabolic effects of fasting. And seem to have already found a substance with spermidine, which has a provably positive effect on the heart.
Spermidine, which is found in high concentrations in wheat germ, soybeans, peas, mushrooms or nuts, among other things, can boost the cellular cleansing process even without a fasting period. After already very successful results in clinically relevant animal models, the researchers now want to find out whether the results can also be transferred to humans.
Regular monitoring with mobile ECG
From all the information gathered, it can be concluded that fasting or a calorie-reduced diet has demonstrably positive effects on the long-term health of the body.
