The advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of mother's market and kitchen mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition. Helical King and welcome to the mother's market radio show, a show dedicated to the Truth, Beauty and Goodness of the human condition. On today's show, you've gotta have it. And today we begin a three-part series on the most important muscle in your body, your heart, later we'll find out what's happening around town and what's new at mother's market, but first step, we begin our three-part series on heart health. And joining us today is nutritional consultant and certified natural health professional Valley Hall. Valerie appears in front of thousands of people each year and speaks on a variety of topics, as well as giving many seminars at mother's market, she's such a wealth of health and nutritional knowledge, we wanna get right to her.

Welcome back, Valerie. How are you?

I'm doing great, thanks for having me back.

I love to be on this program. Well, we love having you.

And before we get to today's topic, please fill our audience in your background of nutrition... Well, I've been studying nutrition for about 17 years, and I love to share all the things that I've learned on ways that we can use nutrients to really support our health, it's all very well researched, they know what nutrients are needed by which organ systems in the body and somehow this information is not very readily accessible for people, and I just love to break it down, make it simple to understand, and that's really my passion, you can tell and you are a natural at it, and you make it super easy for us to find everything out, so thank you for being here.

Today we are talking about heart health, heart disease is the leading cause of death among men and women in the United States, which I thought it was shocking, but we are also talking about what the possible causes... This is, yes, you know, for a long time it was considered a men's problem and really it's a women's problem as well, we wanna make sure that we're supporting our health or heart health, the foods that really drive a lot of problems with the heart, include sugar and starchy things like flour and corn syrup and high foot dose corn syrup, they are closely associating high blood sugar and high insulin levels with heart disease, and this is gonna become, I think more and more of a focus as we move forward hydrogenated oils. When those were added to our food supply going way back to the 50s, and they really got rolling in the 60s, that's a huge problem for the cardiovascular system because it's a poor building block for ourselves, and it's very inflammatory and difficult on the inside of the cardiovascular system, there are a lot of food chemicals that we shouldn't be eating... One of my favorite rules of thumb is if I can't pronounce it, I don't wanna eat it. I think that's a good thing to follow.

Absolutely, it turns out that too much calcium is actually very difficult on the heart, we're gonna talk a little bit more about that, cigarette smoking, of course, and lack of exercise, the heart is like any other muscle, and if we don't use it, it's going to get weaker so use it or lose it. Is this for heart health and the rest of our body as well...

I like it. Well, so food choices and blood sugar balance have a lot to do with heart issues and some of the potential problems that can develop with the cardiovascular system, our cholesterol plaque, blood pressure, circulation and the strength of the heart muscle.

Today we're gonna talk about the strength of that heart muscle, vein and arterial Health and circulation.

Valerie, can you explain to our listeners just how the cardiovascular system works?

Absolutely, the heart beat itself is controlled by minerals, so a little spark of calcium kicks in and that squeezes the heart muscle, and then the magnesium should kick in and relax the heart muscle.

So calcium muscles contract and magnesium muscles relax, so when the relaxation phase of the heart is happening, that's when the Chamber is filled with blood, and then the little spark of calcium comes along and makes it squeeze again, blood circulates very quickly through the cardiovascular system, a healthy heart, it only takes about a minute for the blood to get out and then come back again, when it is ejected, it goes into the arteries, the arteries of the system that carry it from the heart to all of the different blood vessels and into each and every cell, it is a very high friction process because it's coming out of the heart at a very high speed, so it's the areas, the arteries around the heart itself that tend to get most damaged from high friction of the blood, and that's why... That is the place where cholesterol tends to place and it's being put there kind of like a Band-Aid because of that high friction, if our arteries aren't good shape, that can really wear them out and the cholesterol is there so that we don't... Spring a leak and start to bleed out internally, so it's trying to fix the problem, and we tend to shoot the messenger in that case, and we're gonna do a whole separate show on cholesterol to understand that better, but once it gets into the arteries, then it is delivering oxygen and nutrients, it picked up oxygen from the lungs, it picked up nutrients from the digestive system, and then it's delivering those oxygen and nutrients and picking up waste products from the cells and getting that all through the body, the bottom of the delivery line for the arteries is down in the legs, and then things turn around and come back through the veins, and we have end points in our hands and then the veins come back from there, so veins of the return system, and there's not as much high friction in the veins, but the veins have their own sets of potential problems because they're fighting gravity, you've got to fight gravity to get that blood back from the feet up to the heart, so there are a series of one-way valves in the veins and those have to be kept in good health, otherwise, our circulation doesn't work very well, and we tend to pull blood down in the ankles, we've all seen people with the big ankles from poor circulation, so that's an issue for the vein... Valves integrity, exactly.

So that's really how it works, and it gets back to the heart where it gets filled with... It picks up more oxygen and nutrients along the way and pumps out again, so that's the way it all works.

We have a great way of describing that for us for the average Joe here.

So thank you. Very interesting, I recently read an article saying that we can increase the risk of heart attack if we consume too much calcium, that was shocking new information, and what is the link now between calcium and heart attacks? Well, this shocked me too, and I've long been reading articles about the problems with too much calcium in the body, America has the highest calcium diet in the world, and articles that I read range from anywhere between 700 to 2000 milligrams of calcium a day are being consumed in our diet, and then for years, we've been told to take 1000 to 2000 milligrams of ground up rock calcium as a supplement, and that's way too much. The new study that was released in March said that if we consume more than 1400 milligrams a day of calcium from food and supplements combined, it doubles our risk of heart attack, I was absolutely floored and shocked.

So new recommendations, by all means, everyone out there, slow down on your calcium consumption, particularly in supplement form, we should never have ground up rock in our supplements, we should... In our calcium supplements, we should definitely be using a food-based or an animal-based one, and some of my favorite formulations out there, doctors best vitamins has an excellent one called calcium bone maker that's available at mothers with all the co-factors and less calcium. The new recommendations for calcium, if you're gonna take a supplement, are gonna be somewhere in the 50 to 700 milligram range, not 1000 to 2000, and if you would prefer a vegetarian source, Garden of Life has a very nice raw calcium, that's a good blend of the co-factors and less calcium. So those are two that I would recommend instead of the traditional ones out there, it's so nice, Valerie, because you really do know a different... All of the different makers of each brand is what I'm trying to say, so that's a great thing.

A good resource value.

I've been working in health food stores for decades, so I know a lot about the brands there, which is very helpful, which is... So thank you. Okay, so I know there are positive nutrients that can support healthy heart function, where have you found good resources for this type of information? Well, of course, there are some great things we can do. And they're very well researched. My favorite author on heart issues is Dr. Steven Sinatra, and he's a famous cardiologist from the East Coast, and yes, he is Frank second cousin Goodland.

So man, you can see some family resemblance there, but he's written over 10 books on heart health is the Bible that I always go to is called the Sinatra solution metabolic cardiology, and they carry that in a lot of different health food stores as well. He has a new one called the great cholesterol myth that we're gonna talk about in a company upcoming show as well.

So he's a great resource and he's dealt with tens of thousands of patients using integrative cardiology and using supplements along with traditional medications or sometimes instead of traditional medications.

Wow, that's great.

Of course, everybody wants to know if he sings while he ate...

I don't know the answer to that one.

Well, this has been great information, and right now it is time to take a quick break more on heart health with Valerie, just a moment. Stay with us more.

And welcome back to the mother's market radio show. And we wanna remind you, if you've missed any portion of today's show, you can find us on iTunes by searching mother's market or download the podcast from our website, mother's market dot com, we've got the link for radio and listen to past shows, plus download our Healthy Recipes and money savings coupons, all available at mother's market dot com.

And now, back to our interview with nutritional consultant, Valerie Hall, we're talking about heart health, and what are the main nutrition you used to support the health of the heart muscle itself?

Well, there are some really good supplements, it can be very supportive for the heart, that are really what the Heart depends upon for its beat and its energy. The pillars of heart health, as discussed by Dr. Steven Sinatra in his books include cotton, L, carnation, magnesium and de-ribose, and of course, fish oil and hawthorn berry are really important as well, so let me go into those each a little bit, Co-

Q10 is called a cellular energizer. It's part of every cell in the body, it actually crosses the cell membranes at a rate of 500 to 1000 times a second, and it helps to feed oxygen nutrients, essential fatty acids into our cells where they get burned as energy.

So it's a big part of our ATP or cellular energy production, and the Co-Q10 is needed by the organs of the body that used the most energy, and those are the heart and the brain, so it's critical for heart health. Every type of heart disease involves low levels of co-cute, so Dr. Sinatra uses it in his practice for people who have already have a heart issue, and a lot of people use it as something to keep their heart healthy as well, there's a newer form of Cote called ubiquity, which is a converted form into a form that we can use a lot more readily. So either regular cotton or ubiquitous is an excellent support for heart health.

The next one is L-carnitine, and carnitine works in a similar fashion to go go to, but it's a good partner with co-10, it helps to feed the kouta and energy into the cells, and it pulls lactic acid out of the muscles, so it's especially good when there's a lactic acid build-up in muscles that cause pain, we've all felt that if we've exercised or walked a lot one day and then we're sore the next day, well, the same thing can happen in the heart, if the heart is really beating, as hard as I can to get his job done. Sometimes there's some pain that's produced from lactic acid build-up, and if that's what's causing the pain, it can be extremely helpful to add the L-carnitine, but it works is an excellent partner with coq 10.Magnesium is one of the pillars of heart health because it's regulating heartbeat as I discussed earlier, it's responsible for the relaxation phase, too much calcium can make the heart contract and just stop, and not enough magnesium can do the same thing. So magnesium helps you maintain our heart beat, magnesium deficiency is sometimes responsible for irregular and rapid heartbeat, so it helps to really modulate the heartbeat.

Magnesium is one of my favorite things, it's great for headaches, it's great for sleep patterns, it's great for stress, it's great for focus, it's great for any kind of discomfort in the body, muscle spasms, cramping, boy, the list goes on. one's by far, the best magnesium that is sold anywhere is the one by doctor's best vitamins because they use one by Albion minerals and they are the gold standard of magnesium absorption, so that's the one I would recommend for pills a day is the RDA of magnesium, but some people feel better with more than that, I take about six of those doctors best magnesium pills.

Next is D-ribose, whereas the couto and carnitine were feeding energy into the cells, D-ribose is keeping it there, it closes the back door so that we can recycle that ATP energy within the cell is about 90% of that ATP should be recycled and used over and over again, but some people are just losing it out of their cell membranes, probably because they don't have enough cholesterol in the cell membrane to keep it in, or they're building the cell membranes out of hydrogenated oils, which is very poor building material.

So de-Rios is a building block of ATP energy, and it helps to keep it there for recycling, it's especially good for heart weakness and muscle weakness issues, next wonderful pillar of heart health is fish oil, don't overlook the benefits of fish oil for cardiovascular and everything else, it helps to promote a normal inflammatory response in the arteries rather than letting inflammation get out of control, it also coats the platelets, so they tend not to stick together, 90% of all heart attacks and strokes are blockage related, so we want to avoid those blockages, fish oil, it helps to keep things nice and slippery and moving well in the blood, it's also nourishing and very supportive for the lining of the veins and arteries.

Fish is also known to help bring good cholesterol up or bad cholesterol down, so it's got a variety of benefits for the cardiovascular system, as well as other parts of the body. There are quite a few good fish oils carried by mother's market, people could also use clamor oil or krill oil, those are from the ocean and contain those good omega-3s, and now they're making a DHA from algae, which is one of the very important Omega 3. so if you're a vegetarian or vegan, get the DJ from Aldous as a substitute for fish oil for your cardiovascular system, so those are some of the good tips I have there.

Lastly, hoorn Berry is a tonic herb for the heart, it's a great carrier of minerals that the heart needs, and it's been used for centuries, maybe longer, as a tonic for heart health.

Wow, interesting. And especially back to that fish oil with a catamaran and the cell... I had never heard of that before. So that, yes, they're coming up with new sources because a lot of our fish is endangered, so they're looking for better sources that are not gonna be harmful to the ecosystem.

Wow, so those are some of the great sources, but ocean-based Omega-3s are very different than the ones from the land, so you definitely wanna be getting something from the ocean, very good up-to-date information from Valley.

Next question, what nutrients do the veins and arteries need to maintain health? Well, fish oil, of course, is nourishing and helps to keep that inflammatory response in the arteries where it should be.

Vitamin C is often overlooked.

Linus Pauling theory was that the only reason we were put in cholesterol in our arteries is because the college and was breaking down because we weren't getting enough Vitamin C, in essence, we're all suffering from low level scurvy, so fascinating. Some Vitamin C, very helpful for college and building in the body and very protective for the arteries. There's a component of vitamin C, One of the bio-flavonoids called Tasman-Doman is from an extract of the sweet orange, which is a specific species of orange, very popular in Europe, it has tremendous benefits for the veins and arteries. Vitamin K2, there have been some new studies on that that prove that it can actually remove calcium from the arteries... That's hardening of the arteries.

So if people have that problem, the newer kind of vitamin K called Vitamin K2 is critical for that, and the studies were done on a trademarked ingredient of K-2 called menace 7 that you can find in the doctor's best vitamin K2 at mother's market.

So excellent new human studies on that, that show that it really helps to re-arrange calcium get it out of the wrong place and back on to the bone.

And lastly, silicon, I like silica because it's an excellent builder of college and as well throughout the body, so it's gonna help to maintain the health of the arteries and the veins as well as other college... In structures in the body.

So you've got a couple of really good silica at mother's market. Bio-sill is a great one. If you prefer a pill by natural factors or I don... Liquid minerals makes a really good silica that has no taste.

So one of those two is a wonderful support, and I like those two for people who browse easily because it helps to strengthen those capillaries and keep them better integrity.

That's very good. I can look at a furniture piece of furniture and there comes a bruise without any... You need to sit... A good option for you.

Starting that one right now.

Okay, let's wrap up with circulation, and it seems to me that the heart, veins and arteries are healthy, and that the most critical part of circulation that is... That circulation... Are there any other aspects that we should be aware of with circulation... Yes, you know the thickness of the blood, what they call blood viscosity is also at play here, some of the things that can increase the thickness of the blood include High blood sugar, which is one reason why that's being closely associated with heart disease now, but also too much fibrin in the blood, which can cross-link with protein and start to create little blood clots, so that's called platelet aggregation or when the platelets start to stick together.

So that can be an issue for the cardiovascular system.

One of the things that's really good for helping to break apart that and decrease the amount of fibrin is called naoki-ESE, it's an enzyme from a soy food called NATO, that is very helpful as a circulatory enzyme and for the thickness of the blood, the width of the arteries also makes a big difference when those get clogged with cholesterol, they get more narrow and that can really be a problem for the cardiovascular health, and again, fish oil helps to prevent that placing and so does vitamin C, so get on that fish oil and vitamin C. as an excellent support for the arteries, dehydration can also make our blood thicker and stickier, and so we wanna make sure that we're drinking plenty of water, so we're gonna talk a little bit... Sometimes people get water retention, and we're gonna talk about that a little bit in our blood pressure segment coming up, so that's gonna be a really good help to drink a lot of water, but drinking a lot of water will not add to your water retention in fact, if you don't drink enough, then your body wants to hang on to it more, so even if you have some water retention problems, you still want to be hydrating, and there's a wonderful natural supplement called cell are seed salary is a natural diuretic to eat more salary. Watermelon is a natural diuretic, and so is beer. Oh, there's a good Eritreans why we run to the restroom all the time when we drink beer... Exactly.

How is that though? Let's talk about that. let's extrapolate on the bear PART OF THE... Yeah, well, a diuretic is something that us to extract water out of the system, so that's what that means, so... So salary, watermelon and beer are all natural foods that help to eliminate water from the system... Absolutely, and you can even get Sella recede as a supplement for people who have too much water retention, some women like that before their menstrual cycle, if they're retaining a lot of water, things like that, so lots of interesting... There's a nutrient for everything, I'm telling you this woman is resourceful, that's why we like to have value on the show. Absolutely, so really quickly, I wanted to ask you about that NATO seed, because you talked a little bit about that, but Reith that the NATO kinase is an enzyme that... It's called a fibroid enzyme, its one of the proteolytic enzymes which break apart that are aimed at proteins, this one's really specific and targets those, vibrant and protein that are cross-linking together, and that's the building block of a blood-clot at Oconee is actually using over 60000 hospitals in the far east as something that's really good for cardiovascular health and thinning blood that is excessively thick, so it can be very beneficial to support normal blood pressure, very supportive for the consistency of the blood itself.

Wow, well, this is fascinating information, and as we mentioned in the beginning of the show, this is a three-part series, so we kind of talked about what parts were talking through, so Valerie, if you can just kind of overview once again... Absolutely, so if you would like more information, get Steven Sinatra's book called metabolic cardiology, he's got some outlines and brief things that make it easy to understand for everybody, so the pillars of heart health, I include the Co-Q10, the L-carnitine, the magnesium and the DI-BOS fish oil is an excellent ongoing support, supporting the insides of the veins and arteries by using all of those good nutrients that we discuss just a little while ago, which include the silica, the vitamin C, the fish oil. I mentioned the bio-flavonoid di-Osman, and you can find that in a doctor's best product called best vein support, and that really supports the health of those veins that pull the blood back up and bite gravity as well.

I've also noticed an improvement in appearance in veins and arteries on my body using that vein formula by doctors best and that's available at mother's market as well.

So you've got some great strategies here for the thickness in the blood, the nano-kinase is an excellent one, make sure that you're drinking plenty of water, but if you have water retention, sell are seed or eating more salary can be a good support for that.

So we've got lots of strategies to help with the heart strength and the circulatory strength in the body.

Excellent.

And again, just that shocking statistic that heart disease is the leading cause of death among men and women in the United States, so this again is the first of the three-part series, and this has been so interesting, Valerie. We appreciate your knowledge, and we do look forward to having you on again to finish the part two and part three of this three-part series, you can get more information on Valerie on her website, Valerie Hall, nutrition dot com, and learn more about her natural approach to making us all healthier and we look forward to our next visit. Thank you, thank you so much, camp relieve.

You may have tried this tasty dish, now you can make it yourself.

Another favorite of mothers is our red lentil soup, it's delicious, so the ingredients are two and a half cups, red lentils, sorted and rinsed one half cup anion died, one half cup, salary diced, one half cup Carradine, one tablespoon olive oil, one teaspoon basal, one teaspoon, oregano a dash of black pepper, two bales, a teaspoon to marry soy sauce and six cups of water, first, you place all the ingredients in the water in a large pot, you bring it to a boil and cook for one hour over a low flame... Starring occasionally, you removed from the fire and served piping hot, make sure to take those bay leaves out to make six servings, and it's a delicious soup that's red mental suit my mother's market and kitchen.

Thanks for listening to the mother's market radio show and for shopping at mother's market, the advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of mother's market and kitchen, mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition,