Dissolving Chest Pain, Cleaning Your Arteries

We used to think of chest pain as a chronic condition requiring endless prescription medicines, ending too often with a trip to the operating room. As arteries that supply blood to the heart muscle gradually become blocked by plaques of cholesterol, fat, cells, and debris, the heart muscle starves for oxygen. Drugs similar to tramadol when purchased online, might reduce the pain temporarily, but sooner or later a bypass operation or a plaque - busting angioplasty is necessary to restore blood flow to the heart. The alternative is a heart attack.

Heart bypass surgery is now routine in Western countries, even at the risk that some will not survive the procedure. In about 6 percent of cases, it causes brain damage.1 And it is only temporary. Within six to eight years, repeat surgery is needed to clean out the arteries again.

From this dismal scenario much more attractive choices have emerged. In this post, we will see how foods can cut your cholesterol dramatically. Garlic, oats, soy products, and oddly enough, beans and walnuts are some of the foods that have shown this effect in research studies.

But the most important advance, by far, is research showing that a four - step program of simple diet and lifestyle changes actually lets the arteries begin to clean themselves out, without medication or surgery. Chest pain melts away, and blockages in the arteries actually shrink noticeably within the first year.

Researchers first showed that blockages can be reversed in the arteries to the legs. This was important because blockages in these arteries lead to muscle pains after even a short walk, a condition called claudication. But more importantly, if it is possible to reverse blockages in the leg arteries, that means it can be done in other arteries, too, even in the heart itself.

Dr. Dean Ornish, a young, Harvard - trained physician, showed that, indeed, heart disease can be reversed. His research papers in the Lancet in 1990 and the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1995 are now milestones of modern medicine.2,3 Dr. Ornish’s research subjects were heart patients in the San Francisco Bay area. The control group was asked to follow the instructions of their regular doctors. In most cases, that meant favoring fish and chicken over red meat, taking the skin off the chicken before cooking it, quitting smoking, and trying to stay active.

A second group of patients got a completely different program. They were asked to follow a vegetarian diet, which meant spaghetti marinara, minestrone, bean burritos, vegetable chili, rice pilaf, etc., but no red meat, poultry, or fish. The goal was to essentially eliminate animal fat and cholesterol. This was new for them, but they were given classes in how to prepare meals and some prepared foods to take home. They were also asked not to smoke, to take a half - hour walk each day (or an hour three times a week), and to practice stress management exercises, such as yoga or meditation.

A year later, each patient had an angiogram, a special X ray that measures artery blockages. The results were then compared to the same test done at the beginning of the study. The findings made medical history. The patients in the first group, who had been eating skinless chicken breast and fish day after day, were not getting better. In fact, the average patient was actually worse off after a year than at the beginning of the study. Their artery blockages were continuing to grow, even though they had followed their doctors’ advice. Regrettably, these results confirmed that the old - fashioned “heart diet” is simply too weak to stop artery blockages from progressing.

The second group, however, had a completely different experience. When their angiograms were put on the viewing screen and their block - ages were measured, it was clear that something new was happening in their arteries. They were actually starting to clean themselves out, so much so that the difference was clearly visible in 82 percent of patients in the first year.

This wonderful result was achieved without medications or surgery. Their artery blockages shrank simply by using vegetarian foods, along with mild regular exercise, stress management, and no smoking.

Their chest pain went away long before the year was up. Within a matter of weeks, in fact, the pain diminished and eventually disappeared. They also lost weight—more than twenty pounds, on average—and felt more energetic than they had in years.