DIET COMES FIRST IN MATTERS OF THE HEART
If you are not a heart patient, do you still need to worry about your diet? The short answer is yes. The worst offence against the body is eating against nature. OUR TEETH ARE DESIGNED FOR VEGETABLES AND FRUITS. OUR DIGESTIVE SYSTEM IS NOT MEANT TO DIGES
As a cardiac surgeon, the most common question I hear is: What is the relationship between diet, lifestyle and heart disease? Do people really need to care about what they eat and how they exercise? Should one quit smoking for better heart- health?
In my experience, about 25 per cent Indians are vulnerable to heart disease. They are typically from families with a history of heart disorders. They have a very high lipid profile or develop diabetes and hypertension at a very young age, for no fault of their own. They do not smoke, they do not eat bad food and they exercise regularly. But they can still have a heart attack, either due to genetic predisposition or something that went wrong as an infant. For them, there is little we can do to prevent a heart attack with our current knowledge.
There is another 25 per cent, who can drink like a fish, smoke like a chimney and live on junk food all through their life. Nothing happens to them and the only way they will die is if you shoot them down. This is the fortunate class, from a heart perspective.
We are interested in the remaining 50 per cent, the fence- sitters, who by watching their lifestyle can prevent, or at least postpone, a heart attack. All our lessons on ( non) smoking, diet, exercise, yoga, meditation and whatever else we prescribe are meant to protect this group. They can, by modifying their lifestyle, postpone a heart attack from the age 45 to 65. That, I would say, is a great achievement.
Nature is filled with mysteries. How do we know who belongs to the 25 per cent of the fortunate lot or 25 per cent of the unfortunate ones or 50 per cent of the fence- sitters? Current diagnostic tools do not have the capabilities to provide this classification. So the practical approach is to assume that everyone is a fence- sitter and go for an aggressive modification in lifestyle.
Why is it important to worry about heart disease when you are not yet a heart patient? It is because Indians are genetically three times more vulnerable to heart disease than Europeans, and prone to heart attacks at a much younger age. In my practice, it is often not the young son bringing his old father for a heart operation. It is the old father bringing his young son for bypass grafting. Heart attack has reached epidemic proportions. When
I practised in the UK, the average age of my patients used to be 65. In India, it is 45. It is very hard to give the exact reason but being in the Indian subcontinent seems to be a risk factor for heart attacks.
The human body is not meant to eat meat. Our teeth are designed for vegetables and fruits. Our digestive system is not meant to digest meat. Nature also did not create our body to digest oil or sugar. Nature knew that our body requires oil, so she gave nuts containing oil. We are supposed to have adequate oil just by eating nuts. Nature did not want us to eat sugar in its current form, but provided us with sugarcane and fruits containing an adequate quantity of sugar. Unfortunately, nature gave us a somewhat crooked brain that allowed us to process nuts to extract the oil, press sugarcane to extract the sugar. In the end, we are reduced to digesting concentrated forms of oil and sugar. Among the commercially available oils, the human brain decided to market some as better than others. When the foundation of extracting oil from nuts is against nature, how can we have any oil that is “good for the heart”? In the end, it does not matter if you are a vegetarian or not. We see some of the worst cases of heart disease among pure vegetarians.
It is also not true that all heart patients are obese. In fact, when you visit a ward filled with patients who have had bypass grafting, you hardly find people who are obese. Most of them are actually skinny. So the fact that you are thin does not prevent you from getting a heart attack. I am certainly not advocating that obesity does not matter. Fried food and high carbohydrate diet are definitely not good for you, as they raise blood sugar rapidly and damage blood vessels.
I primarily eat chapatti with a little portion of rice, although I have no scientific evidence to prove that chapatti is better than rice. Eat a lot of fruits, vegetables and avoid red meat. Fish and chicken are all right. But avoid fried fish and fried chicken. Try to reduce the oil content in your diet as much as you can. Drink plenty of water. A lot of Indians have the tendency to develop small renal stones, because they don’t drink enough. Flushing the kidneys with considerable water intake protects kidneys. There are also theories suggesting that you can never reduce weight without drinking water.
But how do you know that you are drinking adequate quantities of water? The simple way is to look at the colour of your urine. If it looks like water then you know you have consumed enough. If your urine is highly coloured, it means you are passing concentrated urine due to a shortage of water in your body. As long as you have a strong heart and a normal kidney function, you can drink a large quantity of water without any problem.
My advice to everyone would be to eat in moderation. Never eat for the joy of eating. Have three meals a day: A good breakfast, lunch and dinner. In between, have fruit juice or a sandwich, if you wish. And exercise— not necessarily elaborate gym regimes but simple walks for at least half an hour until you sweat every day— to stay young, fit and to protect your heart.