Your heart is truly a wonderous organ . Even before your first breath , the muscles that make up the heart are already at work , pumping oxygen rich blood to every point in your body and drawing oxygen depleted blood back to your lungs. On average, a heart will beat 37,869,120 times every year , year after year. That’s around two and a half billion heartbeats for a lifespan .
Plainly , the heart is a powerhouse and it’s worth protecting. As you must know , no one can survive without a beating heart and with an average of two deaths a minute , forty percent of all the deaths in the United States are the result of heart disease, led by Coronary Artery Disease (CAD).
As the hardest working organ in your body, the heart muscles naturally produce an abundance of energy and it’s this high requirement for energy creation which renders your heart vulnerable to the threat of free radicals. So , a heart has a high demand for antioxidants and the most important one is Glutathione.
The Heart’s Energy Production
The heart’s extraordinary ability to make energy is based within every cell in the cellular power plants known as Mitochondria. Each cell in your body possesses these tiny energy making locations . Average cells have a couple of hundred mitochondria, but the ones that make up the endlessly toiling heart are estimated to have up to 5,000! The power that’s produced in your cells, is created in the form of a compound called ATP which stands for adenosine triphosphate. Unfortunately , energy production has a price .
The by- products of energy production are damaged molecules – free radicals and with so many mitochondria in heart cells , there is a matching concentration of by-products . Without the intervention of antioxidants , free radicals develop a chain reaction within the cells that can destroy them and their components – like cellular DNA.
CAD and Heart Disease
Arteriosclerosis – Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) which is commonly referred to as a hardening of the arteries or loss of arterial elasticity is one of the leading causes of Heart disease. It’s been connected to something known as lipid peroxidase. That’s what you get when the lipids in your heart are converted into free radicals. Lipids, by the way are a molecular group that includes sterols, waxes, fats and the fat soluble vitamins D, E, A & K. In addition to high levels of Free radicals, patients with CAD also have reduced levels of antioxidants including Glutathione. Missing enough antioxidants to remove free radicals in the heart, this organ and your arterial system will eventually suffer from oxidative stress.
Our systems are designed to deal with free radicals resulting from normal processes, but many of us are exposed to extra stressors that were not part of the original plan . They include environmental toxins (and especially cigarette smoke!), lousy diets, the unhealthy pace and emotional stress of our busy lives and weak condition of the muscles from not enough exercise. This has placed our antioxidant resources at a dangerous disadvantage.
Why You Need More Glutathione and Antioxidant Reserves
As we grow older , our chemistry starts to slow down. The mitochondria in our heart muscles gradually create less energy and we also produce less glutathione – which is vital for a healthy heart. Boosting glutathione reserves can’t make us live forever, but given how hard your heart works , it only makes sense to eat better , live a healthier lifestyle and take concrete steps to increase our supply of glutathione.
Oral Glutathione supplements are not effective, but you can increase your glutathione with a glutathione precursor like MaxONE .
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