Your heart is an amazing organ. It continues to beat while you rest, never taking a day off. In one day your heart beats 100,000 times, pumping 2,000 gallons of blood. In the space of a typical lifetime it pumps enough blood to fill a super-tanker.
Your heart has basic needs, Which if not met, can cause tragic results. Without oxygen, it cramps, just like any other muscle. If it stops, you’re dead.
Heart cramps are known as angina. It’s what causes pain in the chest, left shoulder, and arm. Since blood carries oxygen to your heart, any obstacle preventing oxygen to your heart has the potential of creating oxygen debt, resulting in tissue death. That’s a heart attack. Oxygen is crucial to all tissue life.
Last weekend I had the privilege of spending time with educators in the nutritional field who are well versed in the nutritional evaluation and support of the heart. We went over the next generation of Dr Royal Lee’s amazing invention of the Endocardiograph from 1937. This device and it’s offspring, the Heart Sound Recorder, allows us to listen to, and watch this muscle in action.
Any nutritional deficiency affecting muscles, nerves, ligaments, etc. will be seen in your heart’s function. Doctors are trained to listen to the heart to evaluate health. The stethoscope was invented by a French Physician in 1819, and still in use today.
Because of limitations involved in our hearing and being able to chart these sounds, the availability of devices which can monitor changes in our heart’s function has improved our awareness of how our entire body is functioning, and how to properly nourish it.
There are a tremendous number of non-medical devices which allow us to monitor how our body functions. Take for instance the increased popularity of the Fit-Bit. Here is a wearable device that lets you track various parameters of your activity. Every one of these indicators relates to the health and function of your body. How you interpret and act on these involves an understanding of what they mean.
Thiamin deficiency is known to create Beri-beri. This is a condition where muscles become weak and flabby. The name literally means, “I can’t I can’t.” This is the state of the heart muscle in Beri-beri. What’s commonly seen in many individuals with need for heart valve surgery is really Beri-beri of the heart. This muscle, because of it’s continual work load, will be the first to show systemic changes, either good or bad. (And quite quickly I might add.)
In a lecture of 1947, Dr Lee said this: “As a mater of fact, probably the most important single factor in the B complex is the B4 fraction, otherwise known as the anti-paralysis vitamin. If you give a patient synthetic thiamin when he’s deficient in B4, he will temporarily respond, but very soon has a relapse and is worse than ever. Heart disease is the commonest reaction I believe to be a B4 deficiency. The innervation to the heart becomes partly paralyzed, the pulse erratic, extra systoles are common, and ultimately fibrillation may develop.” The only nutritional supplement I’m aware of with this nutrient is from Standard Process. You won’t find it listed on any label because the FDA refuses it’s existence. We can find it in brewer’s yeast. Liver is another excellent source. In fact, organ meats traditionally were consumed in the past, and are exceptionally dense in many vital nutrients.
Many vitamin companies synthesize these and put them into high potency supplements, but due to their nature, lacking all vital components, fail to work. Since our society has gotten away from eating organ meats, how many of today’s illnesses could be avoided through consumption of these nutrient dense foods?
Since It’s harder to obtain these foods, and our palates have changed, how are you going to insure you get what your body desperately needs? This is why I’ve been a proponent of the nutritional excellence and completeness in these Standard Process supplements.
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