Category Archives: Myocardial Monday

Myocardial Monday: Fiber

Posted on February 2, 2009 | 11 Comments

A few days after Christmas of 2008, Michael’s Mommy suffered a heart attack. By the grace of God, she lives to tell the tale. As a continual reminder of how your diet can affect your body, we here at Being Michael’s Daddy have declared this day to be “Myocardial Monday.” Here we’ll offer information about food and nutrition in hopes that it will help others avoid facing what could be a fatal condition.

Today we’re going to present some info about fiber.

What is it?
Fiber is a complex carbohydrate that makes up the structural parts of plants. It’s a polysaccharide. Remember that? Same stuff. Only thing is, the kinds of polysaccharides that make up “dietary fiber” are not digestible; your body won’t absorb a bit of it.

That’s right, this carbohydrate is Calorie Free.

If you’re interested, you can read up about complex carbohydrates here. Suffice it to say that this long chain of sugars is structured with branches and is more complex than your digestive system can figure given the tools it has on its own, so it basically just passes it along. “I don’t know what to do with it. Here, you have it,” it would say. Should your digestive system ever gain the power of speech. What a horrible thought.

Why do I need it?
Fiber is an essential part of a healthy diet. It is not nutritive, it doesn’t add calories and it gets eliminated entirely. But it plays a vital role in the absorption of nutrients, the elimination of not-so-healthy items and the overall health of your digestive tract.

Is it a laxative?
Not exactly; at least, not the way most people would assume. Fiber isn’t some magical solution to a problem that pops up in certain kinds of people once in awhile. The problem requiring a laxative wouldn’t be a problem if people stuck to a diet with a proper amount of fiber and water.

Soluble fiber, the kind that you find in foods like apples and pears, helps to add water to the stool and make it easier to pass. Insoluble fiber, like in oat bran, helps to give your digestive system a good scrub and workout, making it more able to do what it’s supposed to do.

Is it going to give me diarrhea?
Most people get this idea that you take fiber when you’re “irregular” and that it helps get you going. This is further complicated by the notion that eating lots of fiber will turn you into a veritable geyser of excretions. Comedy bits like SNL’s “Colon Blow” commercial aren’t exactly helpful in this regard.

The fact is, too much fiber intake when you’re not used to it can cause some serious diarrhea and other gastro-intestinal discomfort. From UCLA’s “FactsOfFiber:” “Cramping, diarrhea and intestinal gas are some of the problems associated with a sudden increase in fiber intake.” (italics mine)

The thing to remember is just step into a higher fiber diet gradually; a little increase every day over a multiple-week-long period. Your body needs to have time to adjust to an increase in fiber, to develop the necessary flora and gastric cadence to be able to process the fiber correctly.

And as with anything you consume, it’s possible to get too much of it. An excess of fiber can cause it to bind with certain essential minerals and make it such that they are not absorbed at all.

How does it help my heart?
Excellent question! And, thanks for asking. One particular kind of soluble fiber, beta glucan, has been shown to reduce LDL (the “bad” cholesterol) significantly. Here’s the scoop: your body produces bile to aid in the digestion of fats. Bile hooks up with cholesterol and distracts it before it can be absorbed into the blood stream. Then the beta glucan comes along and binds them both and gives them the bum’s rush (so to speak) out of your body. Lowering your LDL is a very important thing to avoid inflammation and buildup of plaque in your arteries. You’ll get a good dose of beta glucan in that great old favorite, oatmeal. And I don’t mean the instant kind. I mean the old fashioned kind, particularly the steel cut oats that you have to cook for 15 minutes. We eat oatmeal for breakfast three or four times a week. It’s that good. The other cool thing that fiber does is that it helps fill you up. So by eating a meal that includes the right amount of fiber, you are fooled into feeling full from eating less. Neat trick, no? Yes? Yes.

Where do I get it?
From non-processed fruits and vegetables that are as close to their original, natural condition as possible. While I don’t advocate hunkering down in the potato field, clawing Earth-encrusted tubers out of the ground with your bare hands and chawing on them right there, it is best to get things fresh from the farm. Our bodies were designed to use all the stuff we get from the foods we eat as they’re made, and that includes fiber that gets processed right out of most prepared food these days. That squishy, yummy white bread, for example, is made from grains that were stripped of their fibrous goodness.

Whole wheat is a much better choice. Not as yummy, perhaps, but there have been great strides in the last few decades in the areas of making whole wheat and sprouted grain breads much more tasty. And if you don’t like that, you can eat a sandwich made with white bread – and have a side of oat bran. Mmmm! Fibery good!

Anyway, here are some good sources of soluble fiber:

  • Apples
  • Pears
  • Figs
  • Strawberries
  • Bananas
  • Broccoli

And these are some good sources of insoluble fiber:

  • Kidney beans
  • Bran cereal
  • Oat bran
  • Oatmeal (the old-fashioned kind)
  • Baked Potatoes (with skin)
  • Corn on the cob

Go easy on the butter and stuff with these things; this is where the calories go through the roof and the nutrition of these lovely foods disappears. On their own, potatoes, rice and corn are nutritious and relatively low in calories.

So eat your roughage. Your grandma was absolutely right about that.

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Posted in Myocardial Monday

Myocardial Monday: The Wrap

Posted on January 26, 2009 | 2 Comments

Okay, so I’m just getting this in under the wire.

Honestly: I have topics. What I don’t have a lot of at the moment is time enough to really do them justice.

I did promise some recipes, so here’s the first one: a low-calorie, high-nutrition wrap.

This is something that Michael’s Mommy and I came up with after going through our crash course in nutrition recently, in an effort to produce an easy-to-make and not difficult to eat sort of food that would go great in a lunchbox. Since Michael’s Mommy is a nurse and is most often driving around town, she doesn’t usually get time to actually sit and eat lunch. So she has to have it on the go. This wrap is perfect for that.

Basically, it consists of a tortilla with chicken (or turkey), cheese, tomatoes, lettuce and cucumbers. I would never suggest you eat while driving, but if you were otherwise occupied with one hand (charting, using phone or laptop, etc.) then this is the perfect lunchtime solution.

Here’s what we use:

1 wrap sized whole-wheat “Smart and Delicious” tortilla
1 slice Alpine Lace cheese
3 slices oven roasted chicken (or smoked turkey) from the deli section of your store
1 tablespoon low fat cream cheese – we use the Philadelphia “Garden Vegetable”
5 slices of fresh Roma tomato
1 leaf Romaine lettuce
3 slices of cucumber
salt and pepper to taste

This works out to just over 350 calories, and is completely satisfying for lunch, even for a big guy like myself.

Couple it with 2 cups of popcorn (40 calories or so), some carrots and celery (33 calories) and half an apple (40 calories) and you’ve got yourself a great lunch that will provide you with three servings of vegetables and one of fruit as a bonus, with plenty of fiber to keep you going until dinner time.

Happy munching!

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Posted in Myocardial Monday

Myocardial Monday – HFCS

Posted on January 19, 2009 | 9 Comments

High Fructose Corn Syrup

Last week, Nonna asked about this, and rather than give the topic short shrift, I figured I’d cover it with heaping mounds of verbiage and ridiculous detail. So if you’re ready to learn, here we go:

What is it?
HFCS is a sweetener made from corn. It sounds strange; how do you make something sweet from corn, without it tasting like corn? It’s actually pretty simple.

Corn is mostly starch, and starch is just sugar wearing a fake nose and glasses. It only takes a bit of a nudge to turn the corn starch into the sweet stuff.

On a side note, “sugar” itself isn’t just one thing, but is the all-encompassing name for a group of similar molecules (“saccharides”) that taste sweet: fructose, glucose, lactose, maltose and a ton of other oses. Fructose is the sugar primarily found in fruits, lactose is the sugar that is in milk, and glucose is the sugar that your brain needs to function. That white crystal stuff that’s sitting in your sugar bowl is actually a double whammy (a “disaccharide”) of two sugars linked together: fructose and glucose. In this form it’s called “sucrose” – or table sugar.

Starch is what’s known to the chemistry geeks as a “polysaccharide”, or a big long chain of sugars. Think of it as a necklace made out of little sugar beads all strung together. To turn this pasty molecular chain into something yummy, the starch is “hydrolyzed” (this is the technical term for bonking something with water molecules) and the chain is effectively blasted apart. Before all the little beads end up clattering all over the floor of the Petri dish, they grab the hydrogen/oxygen pairs of the water molecules and change their name to glucose. Now, it’s sugar.

Then, to make it “go to eleven”, chemists take the resultant sugary goop and run it by some chemical workers called enzymes to force some of the glucose into becoming fructose. Thus, the corn syrup becomes richer in fructose, making it “high fructose” corn syrup. Get it?

Here’s a good place to note that your body can do this hydrolyzation thing without even breaking a sweat. This is why starchy food like potatoes and bread can really mess with your blood sugar level; the starches are converted into sugars by your digestive process.

Why is it in everything?
Not only can it make things taste better, it’s used to add volume, make bread softer, preserve food, assist with product fluid consistency and bump up calorie count. It’s the wonder additive that can work wonders. Better living through Science! Yup.

Why HFCS and not sugar?
HFCS is cheap. A whole lot cheaper that sugar. Why, you ask? Especially when sugar comes naturally and HFCS has to be made chemically? For that answer, you have to set the wayback machine to a few decades ago, and take a hard look at what our friends at Archer Daniels Midland have done. I won’t go into great detail here (you can read about it yourself), but suffice it to say that ADM (“Supermarket to the World”) lobbied the government to keep sugar prices high and make corn subsidies plentiful. They played games with the market so they’d come out ahead and could sell their uber-cheap HFCS to anyone who wanted it. And food manufacturers flocked to their door.

Is High Fructose Corn Syrup bad?
No, not on its own. It’s no worse than any other natural sweetener. It’s not going to destroy your liver or turn your skin into jelly, give you lyme disease, chronic fatigue, pigeon toes, rot your bowels or cause you to break out in weeping ulcers. It’s just sugar. The problem isn’t the stuff itself, it’s the abundance of the stuff.

It’s very hard to find any processed food that doesn’t contain HFCS. Go to the supermarket and read the ingredient labels on the foods you buy and you’ll see what I mean.

The HFCS promoters say “It’s fine in moderation.” Well, sure it is. But I challenge anyone to go through a day of normal eating given a typical American diet and end up having consumed HFCS in moderation. That’s like standing out in the rain all day and being told you’ll only get a little moist.

What to do about it?
Don’t stand in the rain. The food manufacturers have to provide an ingredients list, so take advantage of that fact. Stick to things that don’t use HFCS if at all possible. You’ll get enough sugar in the fruits and grains and starchy foods you eat.

It’s really not that hard, and you can actually lose weight without knocking a crumb of food out of your daily intake.

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Posted in food, health, Myocardial Monday

Myocardial Monday

Posted on January 12, 2009 | 7 Comments

I was scrounging through the thesaurus I keep right here hoping to find an “m” word for “healthy”, but came out of it quite disappointed. Michael’s mommy, ever the bright one, suggested for this weekly segment the title you see here. Alliteration is good. Having it make some sense is even better.

Today I’m going to rave about the wonderfulness of a series of books my wife and I discovered fairly recently.

Eat This, Not That gives the real scoop on nutrition, and presents it in a way that enlightens and entertains without making the reader feel guilty.

There are three books in the series. The first gives a general overview of the whole concept, the second deals strictly with successful navigation of the supermarket, and the third targets kids’ foods.

The author names names and pulls no punches in delivering the dirt on products you’ll find all over, how much nutrition they contain, and more aptly, how much non-nutrition they contain.

He compares similar products from different brands/franchises, giving the reader a way to make a smart choice.

The basic idea is that the food industry has taken over our lives, and is surreptitiously manipulating our taste buds to want things sweeter, saltier and more fat-laden than we would naturally. It’s amazing to find out how High Fructose Corn Syrup has made its way into nearly everything you buy at the grocery store, and how even foods that have the outward appearance of being healthy have been altered and processed to the point where they’re no better than the “unhealthy” version of the same thing.

Since reading these books, we’ve learned that there are a few very simple rules to follow when shopping that will save us hundreds of calories every day without having to sacrifice our wants, without forcing us to count calories or measure portion sizes, and it pretty much guarantees weight loss.

This isn’t to say that he’s advocating a particular diet as much as he promotes “wising up” of the shopper to make better food choices to maximize nutrition and minimize empty, useless caloric intake.

If you’re at all interested in making even the smallest positive change in your eating habits, I highly recommend the “Eat This, Not That” series.

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Posted in food, health, Myocardial Monday

When Everything Changes

Posted on January 3, 2009 | 19 Comments

Michael’s mommy and daddy received a very loud wake-up call last Monday evening.

My wife had a heart attack.

It came out of the blue. She has no family history of heart disease, she doesn’t smoke, and we had what we believe to be fairly healthy eating habits.

But the Emergency Room physician made it crystal clear to me: she was in the middle of a true myocardial infarction.

This isn’t something we’d ever had to deal with before, nor anything we could have expected. We did have signs, but we didn’t know how to interpret them.

In the weeks that followed Thanksgiving, my wife had complained repeatedly of recurring and increasing pain in her back and her right arm. The pain seemed to center in her chest, but included her right arm, her neck, jaw and tongue. Right after Christmas she scheduled an appointment to see her doctor. I took her to the visit on Monday. One of the tests he ran was an EKG, and he was concerned about one of the readings. He arranged an appointment with a cardiologist for Wednesday. He didn’t say he thought there was immediate danger or that he knew for certain what might be the problem, except that he was disturbed by her “depressed ST wave”.

We went home with a couple of new prescriptions for her: Metoprolol and nitro glycerin. My worry immediately shot through the roof when I overheard her asking the doctor about them on the phone, saying “So if I’m having chest pain, I should take the nitro glycerin?”

That evening, after putting Michael to bed, her pain was beyond anything she’d ever known. She’d taken Advil and Tylenol, but they did no good. We weren’t sure what to do, because despite the pain, it wasn’t clear what was going on. There was no tingling in her left arm, no radiating, stabbing pain. The medicine stated what symptoms to look for in order to justify taking it, and she wasn’t having those symptoms.

Finally, the pain was more than she could bear.

So I called my eldest daughter and asked if she could stay with Michael while we were away. When she arrived, I drove my wife to the emergency room at the local hospital.

That’s when we got our confirmation. The attending physician pulled me aside and gave me the news, and showed me the EKG they ran clearly indicating what was going on.

“We gave her the meds to slow down her heart rate, so that the area of the heart starved by oxygen won’t need it as badly. But we need to get her into the cath lab immediately. I already have the cardiologists on the way.”

He spoke as clearly and as sympathetically as he could, and though I was comforted by his words, I felt a fog of disbelief and shock descend over me.

My wife cannot be having a heart attack. She just can’t. If anyone should, it should be me. I’ve got the family history of heart disease. I have the arrhythmia problems and high blood pressure. It should be me lying there.

I held her hand and walked along side the bed as she was whisked upstairs to the lab for an angiogram.

“This is where we part ways,” the nurse said. I didn’t want to part ways. I wanted to stay with her. But I knew she was in good hands.

They told me to wait in the lobby of the cardiac care unit. Probably wouldn’t take more than 45 minutes. They were going to run a catheter up through her femoral artery, snake it along into her heart, inject a dye and use their scanners to determine where the blood was flowing, and more importantly where it wasn’t.

As I stood in the waiting room, I prayed to God. I knew it was His decision, and that His will was best, no matter whether I liked the outcome or not.

In what was simultaneously no time at all and also the longest 45 minutes of my life, the cardiologist came out the doors, locked eyes with me, and gave me two thumbs up. I exhaled a vast sigh of relief as my legs turned to jelly.

“She did really well, and she’s going to the recovery room right now,” he said. He explained that she’d had a 99 percent blockage in the left anterior descending (LAD) artery, one of the arteries supplying blood to the heart muscle, and this was causing the pain. They inserted a stent, which opens and holds open the artery, effectively removing the blockage.

After a few more minutes I was allowed to go back to her room for a visit. She was awake, but very groggy. She showed me the picture they took during the angiogram, of the before and after. The difference was crystal clear: blockage in one, free flow in the other.

Of course, they wanted to keep her there at the hospital for observation. The theory being, if she’s going to show signs of a complication, it would be better for her to do it where they can act immediately.

So for the next four days, I spent my time shuttling back and forth between home and the hospital.

I have my daughters to thank for taking care of Michael while I visited my wife alone. I dragged them along with me so we could have dinner with her there in the hospital in the evenings. I brought her a tall “decaf” (wink wink) latte every morning. We shared the most memorable New Year’s Eve ever, toasting the arrival of 2009 there in her hospital room with sparkling pear juice and plastic champagne flutes.

I brought Michael a few times, and of course he wanted to make the bed go up and down, and turn on and off every light he could find. And he wanted to call the nurse over and over again. He didn’t grasp the fact that it might make her cranky. I offered to give him a good reason to have to stay in his own hospital bed.

My wife is home now, and she and I are completely in agreement that our lifestyle needs to change. We need to eat better, and we need to get exercise.

So now we’re on a different diet. We’re going to be bumping up the fresh fruits and veggies, whole grains and lean meats. Back off on the dairy, limit the sugar, caffeine and fat intake. We’ve picked up a couple of books on nutrition, and will be sculpting a new menu for our family for this year.

And we will be taking walks every night, starting slowly and working our way up to vigorous 30 minute walks. We have plans to go on weekend hikes when weather permits, play tennis or swimming.

Our life, as we knew it, is over. Thank God, we have been given a second chance to do right. We now know that heart attack signs aren’t always easily recognized. We now know that it can happen to us, and that how we treat our bodies has a very real effect on our health and long-term prospects.

One day, everything changed. And it’s for good.

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Posted in health, marriage, Myocardial Monday