Hi everyone...... a brief context to all this.....I lost my dad suddenly to a heart attack some years ago, he had abundant energy, he was 64, but to everyone around him he was still contributing a lot to the community, working probably 60 hours a week and just a dynamo...This isn't just me admiring my dad, a lot of the 20 year olds he worked with used to comment on his energy. He was known for it, people even joked that he might run into himself one day because he was so speedy.
So you can imagine the shock when we just suddenly lost him, very little warning (athough there were some things looking back, which I can say if people want to know).
Anyway, that led to me trying to find the answers to what prevents coronary heart disease. He didn't have a lot of it, but here's what I learn't (skip this paragraph if you want to get to the main question) - people can have very little heart disease in terms of calcification in the arteries, yet still, due to inflammation, have some very unstable plaque, even if it's relatively new and sparse, if it's 'bubbling' away with white blood cells and other stuff that makes up unstable plaque, it is likely to burst open. When it does the blood clots around it, that clot blocks the artery (not the years and years of calcification, which we once thought) and causes the heart attack.
So anyway, I did my best to find out how to prevent it, and the best I could see was the work of Dr Caldwell Esselstyn, a doctor who actually reversed heart disease back in the 1970's using a very strict, low fat vegan diet.
This was good news to me as I'd been vegan for a number of years and I decided I would go back to veganism, just with the healthy adjustments to meet the standards of Esselstyn's approach.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, i struggled this time around. I was getting a lot of heart skips (ectopic heart beats) anyway, and the extra hunger feeling brought on by the strict diet just triggered my heart to skip more. Due to how my dad died that caused a lot of anxiety. The doctor believed the skips were stress related, but while I understand that, i think there's a tendency to call everything stress related that doesn't have an easy medical explanation.
ANYWAY.....I'm now reading that low carb diets are healthier for the heart and longevity.....and I'm skeptical because I think it's a media thing largely. First it was all 'no fat,' and now it's all 'no carb.' But what is compelling is this idea that whereas carbs are immediately available, fat and protein are not, and so could trigger surtuin activity.
I suppose both could be right, the low fat diet of Esselystyn is convincing and as far as heart disease goes maybe it can reverse and prevent the disease.....but the other argument is less about heart disease directly and more about ageing and preventing that....and so both might be healthy in their own way.
thoughts? Thanks for reading, this is quite a big issue for me as I have, up to now, tended to eat a very low fat diet, my main fat source coming from salmon and egg white (and dark chocolate)