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Wellness by Luke Coutinho: How hormones affect your heart health
A healthy lifestyle, especially when started young, goes a long way in preventing cardiovascular disease
One would usually not think about hormones when you consider heart health, but these chemical messengers have a role to play, too. Hormones affect everything in our body and keep dictating their terms in the normal functioning of all our organs, including our heart.
Estrogen & testosterone matters
We have estrogen receptors throughout our bodies, including the heart. When estrogen levels decrease, blood pressure increases. Due to this, there are also changes in lipid profile. The good cholesterol (HDL) drops, and triglycerides increase, which may be a cause for developing cardiac concerns.
Apart from that, women who are in their perimenopausal or menopausal age are also likely to gain more fat, especially around their bellies, and lose muscle mass. This can put additional stress on the heart. Lower estrogen can also result in insulin resistance, leading to high sugar levels and cardiovascular diseases.
Just like estrogen, a drop in testosterone levels can lead to abdominal fat deposition in men, causing changes in their weight, blood pressure, narrowing of the arteries, or even cardiac arrest.
These changes are natural as we advance in years, but the good news is that you may have more control than you think when it comes to maintaining hormonal balance and boosting heart health.
Here are the top eight lifestyle changes to adopt for the health of your hormones and heart.
1. Optimum gut health: All the good bacteria in the gut are capable of metabolising and adjusting the body’s estrogen levels. When you poop, your body tries to remove excess estrogen from your body, which means if you are constipated, you are holding onto excess estrogen that re-enters your system and creates estrogen dominance.
2. Boosting liver health: The liver performs over 500 roles in the body, including metabolising estrogen. Keep your liver clean. Minimise or quit habits that burden the liver. The liver is quite a resilient organ but remember, there is a limit to that too. Focus on adding cruciferous vegetables, cooked if you have a thyroid condition, drizzle pure extra virgin olive oil over salads, use turmeric and carrots in your meals. All this helps promote liver health.
3. Healthy fats: Healthy fats like Omega-3 fatty acids are an integral part of cell membranes throughout the body and affect the function of the cell receptors in these membranes. They provide the starting point for making hormones that regulate blood clotting, contraction and relaxation of artery walls, and inflammation.
4. Vitamin D: One in two people has a Vitamin D deficiency, which is fundamental to hormonal and heart function. Sometimes the only change you might need to improve your heart and hormone health is to raise your Vitamin D3 level. So, spend that money and get a regular blood test done to check on its levels.
5. Vitamin A: This vitamin plays a crucial role in heart functioning, and its deficiency may lead to cardiovascular diseases like hypertension, atherosclerosis, ischemic heart disease, and heart failure. Vitamin A is abundantly found in foods like sweet potato, carrots, black-eyed peas, spinach, broccoli, and sweet red pepper.
6. De-stress: Hormones do not work in isolation. When one hormone spikes, it has a ripple effect on several other hormones. In a state of stress, there is a surge in cortisol as a result of which several other hormones undergo changes. Besides that, our body experiences physiological changes in blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, and inflammation. We also tend to rapidly deplete magnesium levels, an important mineral for heart health.
7. Move and keep moving: Your heart is a muscle and it needs exercise to remain strong. Research points out that people who sit for more than eight hours a day are most prone to developing type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Remember, the human body was never designed to sit. Even if you don’t engage in a full-fledged workout, just stay active.
8. Fix bad sleep cycles: Sleep deprivation increases your insulin resistance and makes you more prone to type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and a gamut of other metabolic conditions. Lack of sleep activates your body’s stress response, triggers the sympathetic nervous system, and increases the production of cortisol.
Luke Coutinho practices in the space of Holistic Nutrition—Integrative & Lifestyle Medicine and is the founder of You Care-All about You by Luke Coutinho
Catch Luke Coutinho’s column every fortnight in HT Brunch. It will next appear on June 25, 2022.
From HT Brunch, June 25, 2022
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