Having Heart Attacks Despite The Exercise
Former President Clinton’s heart disease and subsequent quadruple bypass surgery present an opportune time to examine a little more closely arteriosclerosis and cardiovascular exercise.
The clearest observation is that cardiovascular exercise does not work. Clinton was an avid jogger and jogged almost everyday. There is tons of anecdotal evidence that people who engage in cardiovascular exercise get and sometime succumb to disease of the arteries.
The belief that doing cardiovascular exercise prevents cardiovascular disease is sort of like the eating to many eggs will raise your cholesterol argument that was being made a few years ago. The belief was that eating too many eggs in a week would raise your cholesterol levels and may contribute to heart disease. This has been disproved.
It has since been said that eating eggs will not affect the cholesterol of all but some so the advice to reduce consumption of eggs now only applies to those with high cholesterol rates for some reason and not for those with normal cholesterol levels.
Cardiovascular disease does not seem to be controlled or managed through cardiovascular exercise. The disease seems to progress at a normal pace despite the most vigorous cardiovascular workout. Clinton’s disease progressed despite years of vigorous cardiovascular exercise.
The President’s disease had continued to progress on its destructive course until he experienced increasingly debilitating symptoms and the need for surgery was determined.
It seems like cardiovascular exercise is only good for increasing stamina in the activity engaged in. In other words if you jog you will increase your ability to run at a moderate pace for long distances. If you ride a bike you will increase your ability to ride a bike at a certain pace for a specific distance.
There could also be some side benefits like the ability to run very fast while becoming less exhausted than most, climbing a lot of stairs without becoming breathless, improved muscle tone, weight loss, and/or better lung capacity. None of this has anything to do with the prevention of heart disease.
I don’t know what these observations do to the studies that indicated cardiovascular exercise improved the good cholesterol to bad cholesterol profile (increased levels of HDL cholesterol and decreased levels of LDL cholesterol), and caused the release of other good enzymes.
Cardiovascular exercise may also strengthen the heart muscle, which may be of some help if you develop heart disease or have a heart attack although I am not sure this is the case. Cardiovascular exercisers seem to die as easily and quickly from heart attacks as the cardiovascularly unfit.
There are some that say Clinton got heart disease because of bad eating habits throughout his youth. I don’t buy that because the disease should have been reversed or at least arrested at the point he started engaging in vigorous exercise geared towards improving cardiovascular health.
People also say that he had most of the high heart disease risk behaviors and factors and few of the heart healthy behaviors or factors. This may be true but I think the general public has been sold the story that cardiovascular exercise can significantly reduce the chances or odds of getting cardiovascular disease, which is probably not the case.
From how thing look to me it seems that the two major factors in the development of heart disease are diet (and despite what some may say we still don’t know the optimal diet to prevent heart disease or all the factors in a diet and their multiple combinations that may cause heart disease) and genetics.
How much weight each factor plays in the development of heart disease or general disease of the arteries and the diseases related to this problem (like angina, and stroke) is not clear. It is clear that both factors play some significant role in the development of artery disease.
I guess the two pieces of advice I can give is know your family medical history (or more precisely know your genetic predisposition) and watch your diet.
There are still correlations that indicate you are probably on the wrong path and headed for artery disease by being overweight (although being obese does not necessarily mean you have arteriosclerosis or high cholesterol levels) or smoking so I do not want to minimize these factors here.
Lets hope the confusion over what is a cardiovascular healthy diet and what is not can be cleared up as much as possible in the future. There is an epidemic of cardiovascular diseases in the US.