The Silent Killer

Your heart is supported by a network called the vascular system, veins and arteries, also known as the highway of your heart. Veins are responsible for carrying deoxygenated blood from your heart to your lungs. When you inhale and exhale gas exchange occurs, thus making your blood oxygenated. Blood then returns from your lungs back to your heart. Arteries, carry the newly oxygenated blood from your heart to tissues and organs to provide them with vital nutrients and support their functions.

Atherosclerosis is a health condition that impacts the ability of your heart to effectively carry blood to organs and tissues due to the accumulation of plaque (fat) within your arteries. Over time these fatty plaques can calcify or harden and become permanent, leading to higher chances of life-threatening conditions such as heart attack and stroke. The silent killer responsible for the development of atherosclerosis? High cholesterol. 

You might be wondering how high cholesterol may develop, and if you aren’t, you should because high cholesterol is the GATEWAY to heart disease and is guaranteed to have you at some point in your life on medications or end up in the hospital. How do we prevent high cholesterol? The remedy is quite simple. Yet as a society we continue to ignore our health and turn to alcohol, tobacco, fast-food, marijuana and Netflix instead. Thus, preparing the next generation of children to be unhealthier than the one before. Exercise has become more frightening than the long-term side-effects that GLP-1s will give your adrenal glands and pancreas in 10 years. All for a quick fix that pays big pharmaceutical companies a guaranteed admission to the hospital when you are 55 years old. Don’t let them fool you. The only way to not be fooled, be educated. Take care of your body. Exercise for 35-65 minutes a day. Eat clean food. Yet we can sit on a couch and watch a football game or binge Netflix for 3 plus hours and rot our brains while the body simultaneously wastes away. Living within these unhealthy habits is paying for someone’s three-star steak dinner. It’s time we wake up to the reality of your current state of health. Especially for the ones who will live on after you. Don't be killed silently.