Smoking, Diet and the heart

The heart is a specialised muscle that contracts regularly and continuously, pumping blood to the body and the lungs.

Smoking
Smoking can be equally harmful and deadly to the heart as taking drugs such as heroin and cocaine. It is is a major cause of heart attack, stroke and peripheral arterial disease. Not only smokers are affected; passive smokers are too.

Each cigarette contains over 4,000 harmful chemicals, of which 400 are poisonous and 50 can cause cancer.
These include:
· TAR
· CARBON MONOXIDE
· NICOTINE
· DDT
· ARSENIC
· AMMONIA

And these are just 6 out of the 400.


Now let's look at some harms that smoking does to the heart.

Coronary Heart Disease

Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) has two principal forms - angina and heart attacks. Both occur because the arteries carrying blood to the heart muscle become blocked or narrowed, usually by a deposit of fatty substances, a process known as atherosclerosis. Angina is a severe pain in the chest brought on by exertion and relieved by rest. A heart attack is due to obstruction of a coronary artery either as a result of atherosclerosis or a blood clot: part of the heart muscle is deprived of oxygen and dies. Below is a video on the causes and effects of atherosclerosis.

Angina

Angina or "angina pectoris," is also known as chest pain. Angina can be described as a discomfort, heaviness, pressure, aching, burning, fullness, squeezing or painful feeling. It is usually felt in the chest, but may also be felt in the shoulders, arms, neck, throat, jaw or back.

What causes Angina?
When blood flow to an area of the heart is decreased, it impairs the delivery of oxygen and vital nutrients to the heart muscle cells. When this happens, the heart muscle must use alternative, less efficient forms of fuel so that it can perform its function of pumping blood to the body. The byproduct of using this less efficient fuel is a compound called lactic acid that builds up in the muscle and causes pain.

Heart attack

Smoking causes a fatty build-up in the blood vessels. These fatty deposits result in narrowing and blockage of the blood vessels.

The moment you light up your cigarette, thousands of poisonous chemicals in the cigarette smoke enter your body and get absorbed into the bloodstream. Some of them damage the lining of the blood vessels by making the blood vessel walls sticky and hence causing them to collect tiny fatty deposits that float in the bloodstream. The more you smoke, the more the deposits build up.

Similar adverse effects take place when the blood vessels leading to our heart are blocked by fatty deposits. This cuts off the blood supply to the heart muscles. As a result, the tissue in that area will die and hence, a heart attack occurs.

Blood vessel is blocked by either blood clots or fatty deposits.

Complete blockage of blood flow to your heart muscles.

Passive smoking is a health hazard.

Exposure to secondhand smoke (passive smoking) is a serious health hazard for smokers and non-smokers. People who inhale smoke from others are at increased risk of disease:
-Non-smokers living with smokers have about a 25 to 30 per cent increase in risk of heart disease and are also more likely to suffer a stroke.
-Exposure to secondhand smoke is especially risky for children and babies and may cause low birth weight, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), bronchitis, pneumonia, asthma and middle ear infections.

So in order to prevent coronary heart diseases, we must not smoke. By smoking, it increases your risk of heart attack by two to six times! Also, we must take extra care of our diet. How to? Avoid consuming too much fats, protein and carbohydrate.

FATS
Avoid eating too much Trans fat and saturated fat.

Trans fat are artery-clogging element of partially hydrogenated oils. They are found in many fried foods and commercial baked goods. These fats increase your bad cholesterol (LDL) while lowering your good cholesterol (HDL) hence, weakening your natural defences against heart disease. Harvard researchers have estimated that banning Trans fats from the American diet could prevent some 228,000 heart attacks each year.

Saturated fat in meat or dairy products encourages a buildup of cholestrol in the arteries by increasing LDL levels in the blood.
Even though some fats are unhealthy to our body, some also helps, like Unsaturated fats and omega-3 fatty acids. Unsaturated fat are found in olive oil, canola oil, nuts, avocados, and fish can actually clear LDL while boosting HDL.

Omega-3 fatty acids are found in cold-water fish. It has been shown to prevent blood clots, lower blood pressure and slow the buildup of cholestrol in the arteries. Large studies suggest that this fat can lower the risk of heart disease by more than 35% and can reduce the risk of sudden death from heart attack by more than 50%.

PROTEIN
Medical research shows that consuming too much protein, more than 30% of your total daily caloric intake could actually harm your body.

A diet in which protein makes up more than 30% of your caloric intake causes a buildup of toxic ketones (waste products when your body burns stored fat for energy). Ketogenic diets can push your kidneys into overdrive in order to flush these ketones from your body. As your kidneys rid your body of these toxic ketones, you can lose a significant amount of water, which puts you at risk of dehydration, especially if you exercise heavily.

The water loss often shows up as weight loss. But along with losing water, you lose muscle mass and bone calcium. The dehydration also strains your kidneys and puts stress on your heart.

CARBOHYDRATES
The total storage capacity carbohydrate in our body is really quite limited. An average person can store about three hundred to four hundred grams of carbohydrate in his muscles but these carbohydrates are not of use. In the liver, where carbohydrates are accessible for glucose conversion, you can store only about sixty to ninety grams. This is equivalent to about two cups of cooked pasta or three typical candy bars, and it represents your total reserve capacity to keep the brain working properly.

It was thought that an increase in fat would lead to high cholesterol which is associated with heart disease. When the studies were actually done, the opposite happened. People on a low-carbohydrate diet improved their cholesterol readings even when they increased their fat intake and even when their intake of saturated fat increased. It appears that your body must rely on fat for energy and the saturated fat you eat gets burned up before it can cause any harm.

Acknowledgements

http://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/bhcv2/bhcarticles.nsf/pages/Smoking_and_heart_disease_the_facts http://www.sads.org.uk/heart_function.htm
http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/guide/heart-disease-angina
http://www.heart.co.il/images/img_01_Education/angina.jpg
http://www.hpb.gov.sg/hpb/default.asp?pg_id=1238&altid=0
http://www.hpb.gov.sg/hpb/default.asp?pg_id=865&aid=113
http://www.hpb.gov.sg/hpb/default.asp?pg_id=865&aid=106
http://www.hpb.gov.sg/hpb/default.asp?pg_id=865&aid=106&altid=0
http://rheumatic.org/insulin.htm
Most of the above information is abstracted from books by Dr. Sears: "Enter the Zone", and Dr. Maffetone "In Fitness and in Health".
http://www.drjaywortman.com/blog/wordpress/my-big-fat-diet-faqs/
http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=50900
http://www.abbottdiabetescare.com/adc_dotcom/url/questionAnswerProfile/en_US/40.20:20/question_answer/question_answer/QuestionAnswer_00146.htm http://www.health.com/health/condition-article/0,,20189107,00.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBf59Z8tgA0
‘A HEALTH GUIDE FOR SCOUTS’

Report written by:
Chia Kiah Yeen
Michelle
Wong Jyun Yir
Neo Yao Kian Andy