Question:
18 months ago my doctor told me that my HDL was
too low and I should raise it through an exercise
regime. OK. I started to run and by now I've upped
my running milage to 50 miles/week. My resting heart
rate has dropped to 41 bpm. So I'm fit and I have no
known CAD. But will all this exercise clean out my
arteries? I reckon every man has some clogging.
Or is plaque forever?
Answer:
Pritikin specifically addresses this issue in one of his books. He uses the
runner Jim Fixx as an example. Fixx claimed that running would prevent heart
attack. He died fairly young while running. I believe he was aware of his
risk factors such as high cholesterol. Pritikin was a big advocate of
aerobic exercise, but insisted that a low fat diet would not only prevent
heart disease but reverse it. Ornish did studies which showed some reversal
of blocked arteries on a low fat diet. I do know that arteries become
clogged when the diet is high in saturated, trans, hydrogenated and sometimes
polyunsaturated fat. I do not know about monounsaturated fat like olive oil.
I read one study some time ago in which butter, peanut oil and a third oil
were fed to test animals and although the peanut oil diet lowered blood
cholesterol most, it caused the most blockage of the arteries.
It is my understanding that exercise does not unclog the arteries, but it makes
the arteries bigger and promotes collateral circulation, thus improving flow
and giving the appearance of "reversal". Naturally the hdl's go up with
continuing exercise and that supposedly drains off lipids that have not
solidified in the arterial walls.
It is also my understanding that you can only reverse heart disease to a
point.... but, that which is calcified plaque is pretty much in there to stay.
I found the recent PBS Nova program on the Iceman to be very interesting. The
Iceman is a freeze dried mummified corpse dating to 5000BC that was found in
the Alps a few years ago. They did an MRI on the Iceman and it showed some
heavy duty calcification of where his aorta and coronary arteries would be. It
was also estimated that his age was 45 to 50... which is surprisingly old for
that era... and there was evidence that he his last meal consisted of meat, and
it was speculated that he most likely was a shepherd and therefore probably
consumed some dairy products. The point to all this is that apparently heart
disease is not just a 20th century malady, but further illustrates that our
relatively easy lifestyle has made our arteries smaller and less capable of
handling the atheroschlerosis promoted by the Great American Diet and our
sedentary living. The Iceman apparently had been trudging up and down
mountains for a long time with his heart disease before conking out from
unknown causes in some permanently frozen high mountain pass.
I also remember another program about a year ago on the Discovery Channel about
some mummified remains found in China dating to 2,000BC, as I recall. The
mummy was apparently someone of the opulent upper echelon of society and had
evidence of advanced atheroschlerosis that was associated with too much of the
wrong kind of food and too little of exercise.
Unfortunately neither drug therapy nor life-stile modification can clean out
your arteries, since most aterosclerotic plaque are irreversible and
aterosclerosis is a disorder starting at childhood age. Drug theraphy and/or
life stile modification (i.e. physical exercise, low fat diet and so on) is
very useful because it stops progressing of preexisting plaques and avoids
formation of new ones.
