It is now known that cholesterol is only part of the picture of vascular health. If you are committed, you can attack circulatory health from all these angles. In a nutshell, to dramatically increase your chances of maintaining a healthy cardiovascular system, we recommend you keep your markers within these optimal ranges:
| Smoking |
|
no |
| Cholesterol |
|
|
Total |
160-180 (mg/dL) |
|
LDL |
80 (mg/dL) |
|
HDL |
60 or more (mg/dL) |
|
Total/HDL ratio |
2.5 or less (mg/dL) |
|
Triglycerides |
100 or less (mg/dL) |
| Homocysteine |
|
7.5 or less (umol/L) |
| hs-CRP (Silent Inflammation) |
|
1.3 (mg/L) |
| Fasting Glucose |
|
60-80 (mg/dL) |
| Insulin |
|
2-3 |
| Fibrogen |
|
<300 (mg/dL) |
| Ferratin |
|
<100 |
| Blood Pressure |
|
|
|
Systolic |
120 |
|
Diastolic |
80 |
| Stress |
|
Not Type A with anger |
| Exercise |
|
yes :) |
Diet
To keep overall cholesterol within a healthy range, the most effective thing you can do is to manage your intake of saturated fat. In our opinion, this can be done by avoiding dairy products all together (The dairy association has worked hard creating the Food Pyramid so that you might think that dairy is an essential food group, but don't buy it) and bringing your chicken and beef consumption into line with what we evolved around, which was probably once a week or less. For diet and lifestyle advice for keeping your other markers within optimal ranges, see our sections on blood sugar,
silent inflammation,
methylation,
and stress.
Telomeres and Vascular Health
It is often an assumption about heart disease, and about aging diseases generally, that they happen with greater frequency to the elderly because they are decades in the making. While there is a sense in which this is true, advancements in the understanding of telomere biology are beginning to call the traditional understanding of this phenomenon into question.
Children with HGPS Progeria, a disease of premature aging, die tragically at a mean age of 12.7 years overwhelmingly of atherosclerosis. However, their cholesterol levels, as well as other risk factors mentioned in the above table, are normal.4
They pose a problem for the gradual damage theory of atherosclerosis and for any wear-and-tear theory of an aging disease. HGPS victims have a LMNA gene defect that compromises the structural integrity of the nucleus of most of the cells in their body, causing those cells to commit aptopsis (cell suicide) much more often and for other cells around them to hyperproliferate in an attempt to make up for the lost cells. As a result of this hyperproliferation, telomere lengths of the cells throughout the body of Progerics have been confirmed to be shorter than those of their peers,5 and their count of senescent cells higher.6
Reduced telomere lengths result in changed gene expression patterns, resulting in a less functional cell, and this is why many believe that atherosclerosis is the common pathology associated with HGPS. (more on Progerics and the telomere theory of aging)
In atherosclerosis, we now know that as we age the arterial lining becomes comprised of cells whose gene expression has changed,7 becoming older, less functional cells8 unable to secrete the proper elastin and collagen proteins and senescent cells that are misshapen or dysfunctional.9
Under the telomere theory of vascular aging, the artery as a result can no longer maintain its smooth, healthy lining and begins to scar, crack, allow LDL particular into the membranes where they oxidize and begin the process of soft plaque formation.
LDL, smoking, high blood sugar, homocysteine and high blood pressure are statistical markers of atherosclerosis under this theory largely because they all damage endothelial cells lining the artery10, increasing cell division/turnover and shortening telomeres. Calvin Harley, the Chief Scientist at Geron, was able to show in 1995 that areas of high vascular stress showed telomere shortening prior to the onset of vascular disease11
If this theory is correct, telomere shortening is the 'true' cause of heart disease associated with aging in the sense that if you lived long enough and nothing else got you first, you would eventually contract atherosclerosis no matter what your diet and lifestyle by the simple fact that the telomeres in your arterial walls are shortening as they naturally divide.
It would also open the door to a potentially striking effect of telomere therapy in the future using a precisely controlled telomerase inducer for atherosclerosis and heart disease.
Until that day, both theories predict that focusing on keeping your risk markers withing the optimal range laid out in the table above is the most effective form of maintaining a healthy cardiovascular system.
See the following sections for managing:
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