August 1, 2007

Excerpt from Bragg’s Healthy Heart Book — Chap­ter 1
Click book title for more information.

Most peo­ple are blessed with a pow­er­ful heart at birth. Of course there are always excep­tions, like my father, who was born with a weak heart. He needed to fight hard just to sur­vive. But he did sur­vive, per­se­ver­ing to develop a pow­er­ful, age­less heart for a long life! Your mar­velous heart, the per­pet­ual pump that Mother Nature gives us, can go on beat­ing almost indef­i­nitely. Accord­ing to Bib­li­cal leg­end, Moses was 120 years old when he died; Noah was 950; Jared lived to be 962; and “all the days of Methuse­lah” were 969 years.

Today, right here in the United States there are over 60,000 peo­ple and the count is grow­ing who are 100 years or older. In our research on longevity we have met many peo­ple who were 100 to 115 and still liv­ing healthy lives. This shows it’s pos­si­ble to enjoy liv­ing a long life! What greater trea­sure and enjoy­ment is there than a long, happy, healthy, active use­ful life, and being kind and lov­ing? Truly it doesn’t really mat­ter what your cal­en­dar age hap­pens to be. In fact, it might be bet­ter all around to for­get chrono­log­i­cal age and con­sider only anatom­i­cal or phys­i­o­log­i­cal age. We do! Longevity is really a vas­cu­lar ques­tion. A man is as old as his arter­ies. Sir William Osler, the Cana­dian med­ical teacher and writer, pointed out long ago, a man of twenty-eight may have the arter­ies of a man of sixty, and a man of forty may have ves­sels as much degen­er­ated as they could be at eighty.

Sir Osler used the word degen­er­ated. Webster’s defines degen­er­a­tion as: Dete­ri­o­ra­tion of a tis­sue or an organ in which its vital­ity is dimin­ished; a process by which nor­mal tis­sue becomes con­verted into or replaced by tis­sue of infe­rior qual­ity, whether by chem­i­cal change of the tis­sue (true degen­er­a­tion) or the deposit of abnor­mal mat­ter in the tis­sue (infiltration).

Our Mir­a­cle Heart and Cir­cu­la­tory Sys­tem
At birth we are given a heart with clean arter­ies. It is our unhealthy foods and liv­ing habits that cause degen­er­a­tion. The care we take of our heart deter­mines the num­ber of years we are going to stay on top of this earth. It is up to each and every one of us to take spe­cial care of our heart so we can make this life a long, healthy and happy one. Health and hap­pi­ness go hand in hand. To under­stand the causes of heart trou­ble, we must know some­thing about the heart and the cir­cu­la­tory sys­tem. The pri­mary func­tion of this car­dio­vas­cu­lar sys­tem (heart and blood ves­sels) is to dis­trib­ute blood through the entire body, car­ry­ing a steady flow of nour­ish­ment and oxy­gen to bil­lions of body cells. Just as impor­tant, it is respon­si­ble to remove toxic wastes from those body cells. The blood makes its con­tin­ual rounds through­out the body’s 60,000 mile net­work of blood ves­sels. These ves­sels con­nect to all the body’s cells, from the heart itself, to the scalp, all the way to the fin­ger tips and toes. The aver­age per­son has between 5 and 6 quarts of blood con­tin­u­ally cir­cu­lat­ing through­out this network.

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