It hasn’t been understood by most people just how vital our gut health is to our heart health.

But in truth, it’s key. If our gut health is good, and our digestive tract working properly, the risk of poor heart health is much lower.

If our gut is in poor condition, however (heart burn or acid reflux often, bloating, pains, regular diarrhea, or worse), then this will, over time, lead to poor heart health.

But gut health among Americans has diminished drastically in recent times, worsening every year mainly due to our processed foods and sugars, and the 50x increase in toxins in our environment in the last 7 decades.

Now, younger and younger people every year are experiencing more and more gut issues which were rare even in older individuals in earlier generations.

And along with them, they're experiencing more cardiovascular issues.

This is something we need to address now, for each of us, to ensure a long and healthy life.

Approximately 1.2 million Americans suffer a heart attack every year. That’s about 1 in 300.

But of those who die each year, about 50% of them have, but ignore, the warning signs that a heart attack may be coming.

In the last article we covered how cardiovascular disease, or heart disease, comes about in the first place.

In this article we go deeper into what happens here, what the aftermath is, what the warning signs are (which can be minutes, hours, days or even weeks beforehand), and what the best prevention is.

This is an important one.

Cardiovascular Disease, or Heart Disease, is the number one cause of death not just in the US, but in the world.

And, despite spending more on medical treatment for this, per person, than any other country, the US has one of highest rates in the world, higher than most so-called developing countries that don’t have the same money to spend on medical treatment for it.

As of 2019, approximately 7,617 in 100,000 Americans had heart disease. And many more are on the path to it, with this number growing every year.

Compare that to the early 1900s when there was very little heart disease.

(This is actually a created problem, and we’ll get to that.)

But the saddest thing is that while it is, in most cases, preventable (even when we’ve already started on the path to it), the solutions provided only allow us to “manage it” or slow it to a degree. Not reverse or prevent it.

And they don’t even do that very well.

If we want to lower our risk of heart disease, then we need to know the exact factors that do cause it so we can prevent them.

And it starts inside our blood vessels, at a very thin mucous lining that runs all along the inside walls of these blood vessels, protecting them from harm.

In the last article in the Heart Health Series we covered how consuming cholesterol is not actually the cause of heart disease.

And how lowering cholesterol levels with drugs, to lower high blood pressure, actually increases the risk of heart disease among those 60 and above.

But while the idea that cholesterol intake causes heart disease may be a myth, heart disease itself is quite real.

In this article we’ll dive more into this, covering what high blood pressure is, why and how it occurs, and what’s actually behind it.

Before we cover what actually causes Heart disease, I want to cover something that doesn’t, or at least not in the way most people think: cholesterol.

You’ve probably heard of the Cholesterol Hypothesis.

This hypothesis states that higher levels of cholesterol, particularly LDL Cholesterol, are associated with higher rates of Heart Disease.

To prevent heart disease then, we take drugs known as statins that lower our liver’s ability to produce cholesterol.

This hypothesis has been so deeply ingrained in our understanding of how the body works, that the idea of challenging it is almost laughable. (Even though it’s still just a hypothesis after all this time.)

However, over the last decade, more and more scientists and doctors have been doing just that, and for one very glaring reason: there is no evidence to support the hypothesis.

Let's see what's happening here.