Cardiovascular disease affects nearly half of all adults in the U.S.and it was knocking on writer Paul Greenbergs door.
Oh, c’mon, that’s so old school."
And why should it?
Nathan Hacket
I’d never smoked, I drank only in moderationusually red wine.
The EKG tracings of my heartbeats were suitable for framing.
True, I didn’texactlyfollow Michael Pollan’s dictum to “Eat food.
Nathan Hacket
Not too much.Mostly plants.”
But I did mostly avoid processed junk.
(Doritos while driving were, for some reason, allowed.)
Nathan Hacket
And anyway, hadn’t the wholecholesterol thingbeen debunked by someNew York Timeswriter or something?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, both of my grandfathers had died of cardiovascular disease.
And yeah, yeah, yeah, my blood pressure had started sneaking up on me too.
I gotta watch my presha."
Paul Greenberg
The pharmacy left five messages confirming that my drugs were ready.
But I didn’t pick them up.
I just didn’t want to.
I was convinced that I wasn’t a statin kind of a guy.
Wasn’t there another way?
“I got this,” I thought to myself.
Without even asking, he phoned in a prescription for statins.
The pharmacy left five messages confirming that my drugs were ready.
But I didn’t pick them up.
I just didn’t want to.
I was convinced that I wasn’t a statin kind of a guy.
Wasn’t there another way?
During the next year I would find out that, yes, there was.
Although it sure as hell wasn’t as easy as taking a pill.
Risk factors for heart disease include high cholesterol, poor diet quality and a sedentary lifestyle.
Stopping or slowing plaque accumulation is where statins enter the picture.
But statins do other interesting things.
They can also lock the more dangerous, unstable plaque in place, preventing it from cracking.
Yes, heart disease, on apopulationlevel, is as serious as it is common.
Most studies put the mortality risk reduction between 5% and 25%.
Now,that’swhat I wanted to hear.
I am an individual, damn it, not a population.
And I am a pretty motivated one to boot.
I decided to give myself a year to make it work.
And if it didn’t, the drugstore was right around the corner.
For the planet, there’s little doubt that veganism works.
A 2021Naturearticle estimates that animal food production accounts for 57% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
So, plants it was.
Here again, I turned to Ornish, or rather Greger, Ornish’s colleague.
What most decidedly wasn’t on the list were animal products and highly processed foods of any kind.
The transition was choppy.
Going out to eat was a nightmare.
At home, though, things went much smoother.
1 cause of death.
But even Steinbaum was cautious about the idea of holding off on drugs.
Indeed, many of the cardiologists I talked to were themselves on statins.
But a week later, when the results of my first blood tests came back, Steinbaum was impressed.
In just a few months, my LDL had dropped from 160 to 127 mg/dL.
My blood pressurewhich had been stubbornly stuck at 140/90 mm Hgwas trending downward to something like 135/85.
Still, she said, we should really dive deeper to give a shot to figure this out.
In other words, more tests.
On the not-so-great side was the result of a panel of tests done by Boston Heart Diagnostics.
Generally, Boston Heart judged me to be sound.
These particles are very strongly associated with heart attack risk.
Worse, small dense LDL levels don’t change all that much in response to what we eat.
Nevertheless, I persisted.
And weight has a considerable correlation with cholesterol.
Greger explained that for every pound lost, people also tended to shed about one point of LDL.
This might have been as important a choice for me as changing diets.
He also notes that the benefit seems to plateau at around five hours a week.
And my labs from Steinbaum cheered me.
“The most compelling markers that we have are the cholesterol and blood pressure,” she wrote.
Your ambulatory blood pressures in May were 120-145/80-95.
Currently, your blood pressures are in the 120s/70-80s."
Based on all that, it seemed I had beaten the rap.
Sadly, several suggested that my whole experiment might be flawed.
The most dangerous pattern is driven by a diet high in sugar and starch, not fat."
Other physicians I interviewed agreed that animal fat isn’t the biggest problem.
Rather, it’s sugars and simple carbs thatdrive insulin spikesand inflammation and, in turn, heart disease.
Still, saturated fat and added sugars can add unnecessary calories, even on a vegan diet.
“But I bake my own bread and it’s 100% whole wheat!”
Not enough, Hyman said.
But before I could get there, thecoronavirusswept across New York City.
All nonessential services were shut down, including Steinbaum’s office.
In mid-March 2020, I developed a dry cough, slight difficulty breathing, a fever and extreme fatigue.
And then, just as suddenly as they arrived, my symptoms vanished.
My breathing returned to normal.
I started running again.
Had my improved cardiovascular health contributed to my mild viral experience?
Had all that diet and exercise paid off in actual life-saving in the face of a deadly pandemic?
I wanted to think so.
Women in their childbearing years should also take an iron supplement.
Animal-free forms of dietary supplements are widely available.
If not, up it.
It’s OK to “cheat.
“(Full disclosure: I did several times.)
A piece of meat here and there is not apt to blow out your arteries.
