If Arteries Could Speak

Yesterday, I wrote about eliminating heart disease through diet. But when will people make the necessary changes?

We continue to eat with impunity, not worrying about disease until a doctor tells us we’re pre-diabetic, have a tumor growing or suffer from sky-high cholesterol.

Too many have gone blissfully through life without realizing that they were headed for a fatal heart attack until an hour before it started. Dr. Greger explains how common this is:

“What exactly do they mean by sudden cardiac death? It’s defined as the sudden, unexpected natural death from a cardiac cause a short time (generally less than an hour) after the onset of symptoms in a person without any known previous condition…”

He continues:

“According to the American Heart Association, for the majority of Americans that die of heart disease, their first symptom occurs not years before they die, but literally minutes before they die. In our last hour on this Earth, in agony, all the dietary change in the world isn’t going to reverse our course.”

And many of us ignore signs of an approaching heart attack. Even those who seek medical attention aren’t always diagnosed in time, reports the New York Times in an article published today:

“Researchers used a Danish registry of 28,955 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests recorded from 2001 to 2014 to track the patients’ interactions with doctors and hospitals in the year preceding the event. They found that 57 percent of them had contacted either a doctor or a hospital in the two weeks before their arrest.”

That their doctors didn’t recognize these patients were less than two weeks from cardiac arrest is both unfortunate and frightening. Whether the patients themselves sensed they had a serious problem 20 minutes or two weeks beforehand is beside the point!

Our arteries know they’re in trouble years before cardiac arrest occurs. If they could talk, they’d beg us to replace the eggs, dairy and meat that clog them with cholesterol with the fiber-rich, plant-based foods that will clean them out.

But they can’t talk. So our next-best opportunity to learn if they’re in trouble is by getting a cholesterol check. If the total number exceeds 150, Dr. Greger offers a simple, clear-cut solution:

“Nobody else has to die. Plant-based diets can prevent, successfully treat, and even reverse our number one killer.”