Longevity and Coronary Heart Disease

Claiming the full potential for your heart – the secret to longevity …

Wasted lives

Lives are being lost unnecessarily, worldwide, due to coronary heart disease. in 2007 this claimed the lives of more than one hundred and twenty thousand people in the United Kingdom. So what is the secret to longevity based on heart health?

There is no known anti-aging longevity serum, but we now have more medical and scientific knowledge about the human heart than at any time in our history. The sad fact is that few people bother to educate themselves about anti-aging, longevity, and how to care for their heart, and many treat their hearts with little care and respect. Some even treat their hearts with such extreme abuse that they die prematurely in their forties or early fifties.

The human heart is capable of lasting 120 years!

The latest longevity statistics research from the United States suggest that the heart was designed to last well past our 100th birthday – maybe even for one hundred and twenty years. This agrees with factual data obtained from studying the medical records for health and longevity from the countries which have the world’s oldest living people and the longest average life span.

The heart is an amazing machine  – a miraculous collection of muscle, blood vessels and nerve tissue which has to beat continuously from the moment we are born, and for the rest of our lives. In a typical day our hearts will beat 100,000 times forcing life preserving oxygen-rich blood to the farthest corners of our bodies. This equates to 34 million beats per year. how many man-made machines can claim such a reliable performance?

We threaten our own health daily

Yet, we are constantly threatening the health and long term survival of this vital organ by our own lifestyles, behaviours and habits. We eat unhealthy diets, smoke cigarettes and tobacco, drink too much alcohol, expose ourselves to excessive stress and don’t take sufficient exercise.

International longevity risk – where do people live the longest lives?

Well, it’s a small, unassuming island off the coast of Japan – Okinawa. This is known as the world capital for super longevity, as this place has the greatest proportion of centenarians (people over the age of 100) in the entire world. Amazingly, in Okinawa, there are 35 people per 100,000 over a hundred years old. By comparison, the United Kingdom can only manage a paltry 10 people.

Why do these folks live such long lives?

There is no longevity pill, but the folks from Okinawa have a long life because they have a healthy lifestyle! This in turn produces a healthy heart. They tick all the right boxes for heart health based on :-

• A diet low in saturated fat
• High consumption of fresh vegetables, fruit and fish
• A stress-free, calm and serene lifestyle
• A daily fitness and exercise regimen

This combination in turn produces the heart healthy benefits of arteries free from disease, low blood cholesterol levels and lack of blood clotting plaque forming Atherosclerosis symptoms. There is also evidence to support the theory of calorie restriction longevity, where people who consume only 80 percent of their recommended daily calorie intake – known as ‘hara hachi bu’ – gain positive heart health benefits from this practice.  

Heart health not genetic, but behavioural

Medical research into the lives of the people from Okinawa has concluded that their healthy lifestyle is responsible for an amazing 80 percent of their long lives. Only 20 percent of the long lived residents old age could be attributed to genetic factors, so there is no longevity-gene for these folks. 

However, there is a disturbing prologue to the above success story – in more recent times, the increasing shift towards a more westernised diet and lifestyle has resulted in a dramatic reduction in the heart health of Okinawans under the age of 50 years – as this group unfortunately now has the highest rate of heart disease in the whole of Japan – proof if it were needed that nurture rather than nature is the principal and overriding factor related to heart health and survival into the centenarian category.