The Perpetual Biological Machine (the heart)
The human heart is capable of pumping blood throughout your bloodstream for at least a hundred years non-stop. Some people are believed to have lived more than 100 years, a Chinese man from the 1800s is said to have lived more than 200 years and have sired over 90 children! In the bible the ancient patriarchs had unusually long lives and living up to almost a millennium. Lastly in the Sumerian legends it is said that their god kings individually lived and ruled the Middle East between 5,000 to 30,000+ years per reign – spanning more than 450,000 years of Earth’s history; which strangely coincides with the first appearance of modern man according to anthropologists. Whether true or not I can’t help but wonder that the heart has the ability to pump blood and supply oxygen to the body for eons (assuming the legends of immortality is true).
Five Best Tips to Take Care of your Heart
Your hear is an 11-ounce piece of smooth muscle clutched in your chest, bio-electric powered, it pumps more than 5 liters of blood through the bloodstream every minute and it keeps you alive all your life. What an amazing biological engineering artwork! If you suffer severe trauma to the heart by impaling or by a bullet wound you will be brain-dead in less than 6 minutes – that’s how important your heart is and yet we often take this fact for granted. So here are 5 ways you can do to take care of your heart:
- Do carb-backloading – too much carbohydrates in the body becomes unwanted fats and they usually go wherever the bloodstream goes. So it’s not surprising to find them clogging
your arteries and veins and you already know when your heart is pumping harder than it should – you’ll most likely end up having a heart disease or even possibly suffer a cardiac arrest and die. So plan not only a delicious diet, but make sure it is nutritious as well AND adhere to the recommended calorie limits. - Quit Smoking – smoking is just as deadly as being overweight or obese – it is absolutely non-beneficial on several levels of insanity; why quite frankly, I really don’t understand the purpose of it other than tobacco companies making millions in profits and people suffer and die from it horribly year after year. Those nicotine and other potentially hazardous chemicals sticks so stubbornly to the arterial walls of your blood vessels, so you’ll still end up with a cardiac arrest over time.
- Workout regularly – working out will burn the stored fats in your body and convert them into useful energy. So that means you are less likely to develop fats that will block your arteries; and will therefore increase your longevity by 20 years or more and if the average life expectancy today is 70 years, then you’d probably have a better chance at reaching 90 or so simply by healthy living.
- Do stress-releasing activities – recently the “laughing yoga” became famous among the baby boomers generation in America because the gurus claim that laughter and yoga
help put off a lot of stress factors in old people, thereby helping them to live longer and be more vigorous. So if you think about it the best way to be happy is to proactively create the environment where you can be happy. Get together with friends or if your friends are not available, then make new friends and enjoy each other’s company. - Visit your doctor regularly – and last but not least do a physical exam each year but more importantly, inquire from your doctor about your heart’s condition.
Longevity is Possible in the Very near Future
In the 1970s one of the rabbits in a bio lab in California died but the scientists noticed something strange – the rabbit’s heart was still beating. So they took it out and placed it in a glass jar to observe it and to their amazement the rabbit’s heart kept on beating 20 years after the rabbit had died. Essentially some of our internal organs like the heart and the brain can remain functional for hundreds of years and it’s just that the rest of our bodies can’t. In 2003 scientists announced that they have discovered a substance that could radically prolong life and that it could double the average life expectancy of humans today. They found that lab rats live longer by giving them a highly concentrated dose of antioxidants. If we can make the rest of our body age slower, then it is theoretically possible to live between 150 to 500 years give or take. That would be a big leap in medical science!
Johanna Oosterwijk ND