Heart Health Supplements – Why even consider them?

When it comes to heart health, there are a number of heart health supplements that you can take.  They are not meant to be a substitute for making healthy heart decisions.  In other words,  you want to take them in addition to following a healthy lifestyle of quitting smoking, losing weight or maintaining a healthy weight, lowering your fat consumption,  and eating more fruits and vegetables, to name a few.  I have to say that this is where, I believe, the medical community still lags, but it is getting better.  For example, my grandmother who was recently diagnosed with macular degneration was prescribed lutein (an antioxidant that reduces blue light damage) by her eye specialist, which I was pleased with.    I recommend that you always consult with your physician before starting anything new, however, you need to know that physicians do not receive a lot of training in nutrition when they are in medical school.  There are even some nutritionists that still say that you can get all of your vitamins and minerals for good health from your diet.  I definitely think that we need to consume nutrient-rich foods, but to think that our foods today are of the same nutritional value as fifty to a hundred years ago does not make sense to me.  First of all, how many of us actually grow big gardens like our parents and grandparents did?  Instead our vegetables and fruits are grown in mineral-depleted soils, picked before they are ripened, travel a distance to get to the supermarket, and then spend more time in our fridges where the nutrient value continues to decline.

So, if physicians like my grandmother visited are recognizing lutein as important for eyes, then why wouldn’t we consider supplements for other body parts?  That is why I was pleased to see in the June, 2002 issue of the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), that there was an article that actually acknowledged that most people do not take in optimal levels of vitamins through their diets alone, and that all adults should take a multivitamin to prevent diseases such as osteoporosis (bone loss), cancer, and cardiovascular disease – yes, even cardiovascular disease.

In the next post, I wil continue on the topic of supplements and how they can improve our heart health.