The Stress – Cholesterol Connection
Monday, August 18th, 2008
We already know that practically every American male and many females over forty has noticeable narrowing of the coronary blood vessels due to deposits of fat and cholesterol in the artery walls. Some men may have a 30- or 40-percent coronary narrowing; in others, the may range to 70 or 80 percent.
There can be no doubt that you who have advanced coronary disease are sitting on a primed powder keg. Any significant increase in the amount of fat or cholesterol in your blood may choke up your diseased artery and cause a coronary attack. You can’t afford the risk of increasing your cholesterol level.
The fact that mental stress can mobilize fat and cholesterol in the blood, means that stress relief should be part of your health cholesterol lowering tasks!
Colonel Groover shifted Air Force personnel who showed the cholesterol-rise of mental stress into less-stressful jobs. The blood picture improved rapidly when the men were relieved of high stress responsibility, or given work under a less-exacting boss. But, this is not always possible in civilian life, where a man can’t readily shift to another job, at a salary or benefits adequate to meet his family’s needs.
It is simple enough for a doctor to instruct us to “take things easier,” but very few of us have the opportunity to do so, let alone the will power or the temperament to carry it out. If you find that can’t “take it easy” through changing your habits or lifestyle, you should seek the help of a physician. Doctors can prescribe one or another of the new drugs to help calm you down, slow you up, ease your mental and emotional tension. However, you should try first to do this on your own as you want to learn how to calm from within instead of running for a pill.
There is also some glimmer of hope, that we may soon know the actual body mechanism through which mental stress pumps fat and cholesterol into the blood stream. Several research teams have presented convincing proof that the adrenal glands may be involved. It is, of course, well known that emotional stress causes the adrenal glands to discharge a powerful hormone into the blood. Apparently, among the many reactions produced, cholesterol is mobilized in the blood, probably by way of the liver.
This is a good thing to know. Scientists can now follow through, and perhaps come up with a drug which will block, or hold down this effect.
Meanwhile—don’t blame tension alone for causing coronary disease. No doubt; tension, plus a high hard-fat diet adds to the attack hazard, when a coronary blood vessel is narrowed with plaque. The danger may even be doubled. But the primary cause of a coronary attack is the sticky fat plaque.
So look to what goes on your knife and fork!
