You might have heard of health giving properties of Cocoa powder.  For best health results, one needs a product that is unsweetened, alkaline free, closest to the nature possible.

I found that Chatfield’s Premium Cocoa Powder comes close to meeting these requirements to a large extent.

You may find more information on it at consumerdom.com

Remember, I use Almond milk and Stevia for taste, thereby avoiding all the undesirable health problems that may otherwise creep in.

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For complete details on strategies of overcoming heart disease refer to heartdiseasereversal.com

What Is Atherosclerosis?

Atherosclerosis (ath-er-o-skler-O-sis) is a disease in which plaque (plak) builds up on the insides of your arteries. Arteries are blood vessels that carry oxygen-rich blood to your heart and other parts of your body.

Plaque is made up of fat, cholesterol, calcium, and other substances found in the blood. Over time, plaque hardens and narrows your arteries. The flow of oxygen-rich blood to your organs and other parts of your body is reduced. This can lead to serious problems, including heart attack, stroke, or even death.

Atherosclerosis

Figure A shows a normal artery with normal blood flow. Figure B shows an artery with plaque buildup.

Overview

Atherosclerosis can affect any artery in the body, including arteries in the heart, brain, arms, legs, and pelvis. As a result, different diseases may develop based on which arteries are affected.

• Coronary artery disease (CAD). This is when plaque builds up in the coronary arteries. These arteries supply oxygen-rich blood to your heart. When blood flow to your heart is reduced or blocked, it can lead to chest pain and heart attack. CAD also is called heart disease, and it’s the leading cause of death in the United States.
• Carotid (ka-ROT-id) artery disease. This happens when plaque builds up in the carotid arteries. These arteries supply oxygen-rich blood to your brain. When blood flow to your brain is reduced or blocked, it can lead to stroke.
• Peripheral arterial disease (PAD). This occurs when plaque builds up in the major arteries that supply oxygen-rich blood to the legs, arms, and pelvis. When blood flow to these parts of your body is reduced or blocked, it can lead to numbness, pain, and sometimes dangerous infections.

Some people with atherosclerosis have no signs or symptoms. They may not be diagnosed until after a heart attack or stroke.

The main treatment for atherosclerosis is lifestyle changes. You also may need medicines and medical procedures. These, along with ongoing medical care, can help you live a healthier life.

What Are the Signs and Symptoms of Atherosclerosis?

Atherosclerosis usually doesn’t cause signs and symptoms until it severely narrows or totally blocks an artery. Many people don’t know they have the disease until they have a medical emergency, such as a heart attack or stroke.

Some people may have other signs and symptoms of the disease. These depend on which arteries are severely narrowed or blocked.

The coronary arteries supply oxygen-rich blood to your heart. When plaque narrows or blocks these arteries (a condition called coronary artery disease, or CAD), a common symptom is angina (AN-ji-na or an-JI-na).

Angina is chest pain or discomfort that occurs when your heart muscle doesn’t get enough oxygen-rich blood. Angina may feel like pressure or a squeezing pain in your chest. You also may feel it in your shoulders, arms, neck, jaw, or back.

This pain tends to get worse with activity and go away when you rest. Emotional stress also can trigger the pain.

Other symptoms of CAD are shortness of breath and arrhythmias (irregular heartbeats).

The carotid arteries supply oxygen-rich blood to your brain. When plaque narrows or blocks these arteries (a condition called carotid artery disease), you may have symptoms of a stroke. These symptoms include sudden numbness, weakness, and dizziness.

Plaque also can build up in the major arteries that supply oxygen-rich blood to the legs, arms, and pelvis (a condition called peripheral arterial disease). When these arteries are narrowed or blocked, it can lead to numbness, pain, and sometimes dangerous infections.

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Comparing the roles of food and medicine in achieving and maintaining health is easy. Food provides nutrients that help maintain health and prevent disease. In contrast, medicine acts to relieve the symptoms of illness and to help sick people regain health.

Thus, food provides nutrients that are the building blocks for health and medicine as a repair that helps to overcome the cause of the illness.

Eating a meal causes the release of many hormones, such as insulin, and other chemicals that influence how cells communicate to produce proteins that impact energy storage and use.

Understanding the complex pathways associated with hormones is a multibillion dollar effort by drug companies. Emerging evidence, however, shows that some of these pathways - particularly those involved in regulating insulin levels after eating - normally are regulated by certain foods, namely carbohydrates.

Insulin regulates the uptake, storage and use of many nutrients, including sugar or glucose and fat after a meal. The composition of a meal, particularly the type of carbohydrate, affects glucose levels in the blood, which influences insulin concentration.

Complex carbohydrates, such as whole grains, delay the increase in blood sugar, but simple carbohydrates, such as table sugar or soda, causes a rapid spike in blood glucose.

Diets may be classified based on their effects on insulin response after eating a meal. High-insulin-response diets elevate insulin levels for prolonged periods of time (four to six hours) after eating. In contrast, low-insulin response meals yield a much lower insulin level that is maintained for long periods of time. High insulin levels are thought to promote obesity by increasing fat storage and decreasing fat use to meet energy needs.

Perhaps not surprisingly, fat tissue below the skin in the abdomen produces unique chemical signals that decrease the effectiveness of insulin in regulating sugar and fat use. Thus, fat or adipose tissue is a target to evaluate the effects of diet on development of obesity and type 2 diabetes.

A recent study provides valuable insight as to how fat cells respond to these types of diets. Overweight and obese women and men with various clinical signs characteristic of pre-diabetes (elevated fasting insulin levels, increased waist circumferences, high blood pressure and increases in certain types of lipids in the blood) consumed diets with either a high- or low-insulin response for three months. Low-insulin response would be from eating bread and pasta made from unprocessed cereal, grains and pasta, and high-insulin response would be from eating bread made from processed oat-wheat-potato flour, bread and potatoes.

The diets had the same amounts of fiber, fat, carbohydrate and protein. As expected, consumption of the low- compared with the high-insulin response diet resulted in important reductions in fasting insulin and glucose after a standardized, high-glucose test meal. This effect, however, occurred without a decrease in body weight, which is the expected change associated with decreases in blood insulin and glucose.

Analysis of small pieces of fat obtained from under the skin at the front of the abdomen revealed some very important changes within these cells. The size of the fat cells decreased with the low- but not the high-insulin response diet. In the fat cells, certain genes that manage the production of proteins that control specific functions were impacted. The low-insulin response diet turned off many genes, specifically those that regulate how insulin affects carbohydrate and fat storage, and regular replacement of cells.

Two other findings are critical. The low-insulin response diet decreased the activity of an enzyme, hormone-sensitive lipase, which controls release of fats stored in fat cells. People with reduced activity of this enzyme have lower levels of glucose, insulin and fats in the blood. Thus, it is thought that the decreased activity of this enzyme probably accounts for some of the benefits of diets designed to lower insulin secretion.

The low-insulin response diet also reduced the presence of another gene, one which is known to be a strong predictor of development of type 2 diabetes. In contrast, the high-insulin response diet increased the activity of other genes related to stress and inflammation - processes related to adverse effects of obesity, including type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

The general application of these findings for each of us is simple. We should eat more fruits, vegetables and legumes (dry peas, beans and peanuts), choose whole-grains or products that are minimally processed, such as pasta and old-fashioned oatmeal and cereals, and limit intake of products high in concentrated sugar. These recommendations have the benefit of replacing high calories with high nutrient (vitamin, mineral and fiber) content foods.

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Structural integrity, flexibility and permeability of cell membrane are crucial for any organism and diabetes is primarily a result of an improper cell membrane structure. This may surprise the mainstream which is obsessed with insulin based theories such as pancreas not producing enough insulin to meet body’s needs. Real problem in Type 2 diabetes is not lack of insulin but in most instances an excess of insulin which is ineffective against hardened cell membrane. When insulin knocks at the cellular door, a series of chemical reactions activate glucose transporters and for simplicity, let us discuss GLUT 4, which travel from inside of the cell towards membrane to facilitate glucose entry into the cell. The pathway all along is heavily a fat based construction on which these transporters go through.

It may be surprising to the fat haters who blame everything on fats, but in reality our cellular membrane structures are heavily dependent on fats as the structural element. If these are Omega 3 fatty acids, the cell membrane structure is supple and flexible enough for easy entry of not only sugar but other necessary molecules. If the body does not get sufficient amounts of these Omega 3 fatty acids, it substitutes whatever fats it is supplied with. These may be trans fats, hydrogenated oils, short and medium chain fatty acids. All these pose problems for proper entry of sugar and insulin becomes less effective as the GLUT 4 will have difficult passage to go through the stiffened membranes of wrong fats. Trace element Chromium helps to a certain extent to ease this condition, but it can only go so far under wrong structural integrity to begin with which is the main problem of diabetes.

This requires a paradigm shift in thinking on how to address the fundamental issue in diabetes which is the improper cell membrane. Diabetes is the result of food industry’s profit oriented thinking of long shelf life with wrong fats such as trans fats, hydrogenated, partially hydrogenated, short and medium chain fatty acids at the expense of long term health consequences of the population. This is only the partial story, as there is the other main culprit which is an extensive and indiscriminate use and promotion of refined sugars based products all over the super market shelves beyond what is a reasonable limit if any.

More later in the coming days…

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