|
Blood vessels
supply the road map through which blood travels. The heart is the
single motor for all traffic along your circulatory system. Arteries
carry the blood away from the heart, branching into smaller and
smaller tributaries called arterioles like a river in reverse. Every
artery is surrounded by smooth muscle that can relax to increase
flow or constrict to reduce flow. Your autonomic nervous system
controls these muscles like a giant traffic light switchboard, directing
the most amount of flow to the areas that need it most at any given
time.
If you take off into a sprint, the arteries supplying
your leg muscles will relax and expand allowing more blood to bring
needed oxygen and nutrients to the leg's muscles. Eat a burger,
and the arteries supplying your digestive tract relax increasing
blood flow and absorption of digestive nutrients. Spend too much
time in the hot sun and the arteries supplying your skin relax allowing
blood more of a chance to release heat near the body's surface.
Eventually the blood traveling through the arterioles
branches into the smallest type of blood vessels known as capillaries.
In fact capillaries are so small that often red blood cells are
forced to travel through them in a single file line. One arteriole
could serve 100 capillaries. The walls of capillaries are only one-cell
thick, and it is through these walls that nutrients and waste are
transferred between the blood and the tissue. The capillaries eventually
converge forming small tributaries called venules. These converge
to form small veins, which continue to join forming larger and larger
veins. All these veins eventually drain into the heart. Veins have
thin walls devoid of muscle. By the time blood reaches the veins
it has lost much of the pressure put on the blood within the arteries.
The veins contain valves, which prevent blood from flowing backward.
The heart moves the blood through the veins by repetitively sucking
some of it into one of its chambers, transferring that blood to
a different chamber and pushing it out through an artery.
(Diagram coming soon) The Vessels
Heart-Arteries-Arterioles-Capillaries-Venules-Veins-Heart
A healthy diet
A well-rounded
meal roughly composed of 60% carbos, 10-15% protein, 25-30% fat.
You can disregard the numbers as long as you center your meals around
fruits veggies and grains (including pasta) and keep your meat poultry
and seafood intake between 4-6 ounces per day. (about the size of
your fist)
Avoid add on fats like butter and oil.
This avoids cholesterol sludge in your arteries and keeps weight and
blood pressure down.
Avoid
saturated fats.
Eat
unsaturated fats unless there is a family history of cancer.
Avoid
fatty greasy foods.
Fast
food as a general rule is soaked in artery hardening fat.
Avoid
eating large quantities of salt.
Cook
from scratch.
Eat
carrots and other yellow and orange veggies.
These
are rich in antioxidants, including Vitamin C and Beta-carotene,
to protect against heart disease.
Aerobic
exercise
Aerobic
exercise such as running, swimming, biking or hiking, 30 minutes
a day 3 times a week. Lack of exercise can be as great a risk factor
as smoking, high blood pressure and high cholesterol.
Get
8 hours of sleep every night.
Don't
Smoke.
Keep
your weight at a healthy level.
Refer to the
body weight
chart.
Keep
stress at a minimum.
Exercise can help you accomplish this.
Visit
your doctor for a physical every year.
TheyÕll
make sure your weight is normal, your blood pressure is under 140/90
and your total cholesterol divided by your HDL is 4.5 or below.
(LDL is the cholesterol that deposits fatty plaque on your arterial
walls while HDL keeps your arteries clean.)
|
