New Research: Are You At Risk For Heart Disease?

Did you know that in the 1920's heart disease accounted for only 10% of deaths a year in America, but today heart disease is America's number one killer? I'll tell you what's responsible for this increase just up ahead. But first let me tell you why you should care.

Heart Disease is Sneaky

Heart disease sneaks up on people. It doesn't knock first, it just breaks down the door. People don't see it coming and, at first, they actually have trouble believing that it has happened to them. You don't want to be one of these people, right?

The health care landscape is changing rapidly. You need to inform yourself about risks to your heart and then take appropriate action. The best time to protect your heart health is when you don't have to. Because once you have heart disease, your health and quality of life will be seriously compromised.

I'm assuming two things: 1)you want to avoid dying before your time or spending your life stuck in the misery and limitations of a serious health problem that won't go away; and 2) you want to enjoy a long, well-lived life, one where you can get your fair share of happiness and satisfaction?

Now let's consider some of the real skinny on your heart health.

Here's What You Need to Know

A close look at the rise in heart disease tells us exactly what we need to know and do to protect ourselves.

We now know that stress drives a good deal of heart disease, heart attacks and what's called "sudden death." Sudden death is just that. With no warning, the heart dies. It's a death that's so unexpected, so devastating and so final. For nearly half the people who die of heart disease each year, the first warning sign that they had a heart problem is death.

Now stress is not just about feeling tired, wired and on edge. Stress is about the release of dangerous chemicals into your body, chemicals known as stress hormones. They can put your heart at serious risk. And we now know that stress triggers both anxiety and depression, two problems studies show also contribute to heart disease.

Let me explain.

Your Fight or Flight Response is Obsolete

You have a hard-wired mechanism built into your body. It's called the "Fight or Flight Response." This mechanism prepares you to fight or flee from life threatening danger by releasing powerful stress hormones into your blood.

Unfortunately your "Fight or Flight Response" was designed for a time that is no more. It was well-suited to a simpler time, a time when life was much less chaotic and hectic. Evolutionary scientists call this a "Mismatch Problem".

When your ancestors were in life threatening danger, their Stress Faucet would turn on releasing hormones to prepare them to fight or run like hell. If they survived, their Stress Faucet would soon close.

But yours doesn't. Here's why.

The pace and style of life today leaves you prone to a lot of stress, stress at work, stress at home, stress in your relationships, and stress in your financial life. As a consequence, what we call your "Stress Faucet" gets turned on too frequently and it stays on too long.

And this often happens in error, triggered by your psychological fears and worries that a part of your brain misinterprets. Then stress chemicals seep into your blood and heart tissues and linger there. This causes strain and damage to your heart and can even "kill" it.

Two Senior National Institute of Health Scientists, Drs. Chrousos and Gold, put it this way:

"In our modern society, stress hormones continue to wash through the system in high levels, never leaving, and so the stress response that once gave ancient people the speed and endurance to escape life-threatening dangers runs constantly in many modern people and never shuts down. Stress leads to serious health problems."

Stress is clearly linked with the leading causes of death today with heart disease being first among them. For example, a study reported in the Journal of Invasive Cardiology focused on 409 heart attack patients. Over half of these patients had their heart attack following a very recent stressful event.

The research is clear and strong on stress and heart disease, but vested interests prevent the knowledge from being commonly known.

Uninformed and Misinformed: Don't be Fooled

And so a majority of people are either uninformed or more often misinformed about what really threatens their heart. But if we work toward an accurate statement of the problem based on research, we can find some reliable and powerful solutions.

We have to learn how to gain control of stress and get stress hormones out of our blood and tissues.

To give you a feel for how much the public is misinformed, the idea that high cholesterol is the primary driver of heart disease is false. Dr George Mann a highly respected science researcher calls this idea "the worst fraud perpetrated on the American public", as quoted in a newsletter by Dr. Paul Rosch, a preeminent medical scientist and world's leading expert on stress.