How To Improve Your Heart Health: 5 Important Tips You Can Use Today!

The heart pumps about 2.5 billion times in an average human lifespan. That's 100,000 beats per day, 35 million beats per year. And it's really incredible when you stop to think that we have this incredible muscle in the center of our bodies connected to this circulatory system that's constantly working for us, pumping this nutrient and oxygen-rich blood across our bodies into our vital organs to give us this experience of life. And I think in today's day and age, many of us are looking at how can we optimize our heart health? How can we stay healthy? And that's exactly what I want to share with you in today's episode. I want to share with you some categories of stuff that I believe is the very best advice to improve your heart health. We're going to talk about nutrition, sleep, exercise, supplementation, lifestyle factors, and even stuff like human connection and goodness. And to kick this off, I think it's very prudent to talk about how do things go wrong when it comes to our heart health? We know the stats. There are roughly 800,000 people that have a heart attack every single year in the United States. And if we extend those numbers out globally, the number is massive. That's roughly every 30 seconds someone's having a heart attack or cardiovascular event. But many of us don't know how the heart actually breaks down. So I think we start there, and then we move into what we should be doing. Well, the first thing that happens is our heart is connected to these blood vessels. And we all know that blood pressure tends to get higher when we are unhealthy. Why is this a problem? Well, if you think of your heart as this closed system that is full of these tubes, when there's a lot of high pressure blood that's moving through there, oftentimes that damages that really precious intima layer of your blood vessels. And when this happens, the body ends up laying down plaque to repair things. And again, partly due to high blood pressure, but also due to eating inflammatory foods. We're going to talk a lot about that when we get into our first section on nutrition. Things like certain kinds of fats, certain kinds of sugars actually lead the body to create inflammatory types of cholesterol that's laid down as a plaque. And then what happens is when plaques get so laid down, the arteries become so, so small and pressure is so, so high, eventually things get completely clogged. And if those arteries in your heart itself, the vessels that supply the heart itself get clogged, you have a heart attack. So we're having high blood pressure, a buildup of plaques, but that's not it. The heart is also a muscle. And like all muscles as we age, you use it or you lose it. And many people, unfortunately, living sedentary lifestyles just aren't training their heart enough. And when the heart's not trained, it gets weaker in time. And then on top of that, many of us have nutritional deficiencies. We're not getting enough magnesium. We're not getting enough CoQ10. And these are critical factors for this electrical heart to continue to function and work. So if you take the totality of all this detrained heart, poor nutrition, inflammation, high blood pressure, and all these other things in a stressful lifestyle, it's not surprising my heart disease is the number one killer of men and women worldwide. So today's video and today's episode, we're going to help fix that. We're going to look at these main categories and to kick this off, we're going to start to look at nutrition because I believe nutrition is probably the easiest place for most of us to start to make improvements with our health. There are certain foods that cause inflammation in our bodies. These are sugar foods, processed fats, vegetable and seed oils. We're finding this in a lot of the foods that we know is quote unquote unhealthy. Well, the reason these foods are unhealthy is they cause inflammation in the body. And when we have an inflammatory environment, the body needs to respond to this. And so imagine this, if you're effectively interested in your heart health and you're literally poisoning yourself every single day with sugar and bad fats and you're creating inflammation and your body's naturally going to respond because you have this immune system and it's going to try to prevent the inflammation. Many of us have heard that we have cholesterol, right? And we have good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. The bad cholesterol is often referred to as the LDL and the good cholesterol is referred to as the HDL. When you go get blood work from your doctor, they'll look at your total cholesterol as well as your LDL, HDL, and another thing called VLDL. And they'll look at the different proportions of this. Well, here's the deeper cut of this. LDL cholesterol, bad cholesterol is not in itself bad. When that LDL gets oxidized in an inflammatory environment, then it becomes bad. So it's not just like having a high total number, it's whether that's being oxidized. And the biggest factor of whether your cholesterol is oxidized is if you're having these crappy foods. So I want to talk about some bad fats to kick this off. Trans fats. We often heard you don't want these. Well, where are trans fats found? They're found in almost all fast foods, almost all fried foods, chicken nuggets, french fries, chips, pastries, baked goods. Most of the carbohydrates you find that come in boxes and bags in the interior aisles of the grocery store have these inflammatory fats. And for some of us, it affects us more than others, especially if we have any genetic or family history of heart disease or predisposition. This stuff is absolutely terrible. And I want you to start thinking about foods as whether they're poisoning your body or enhancing your health. Then the other aspect besides the bad fats is the sugars, right? If you've ever heard someone who has diabetes or prediabetes, one of the big metrics they look at to see how far along in this spectrum you are is something called the HBA1C. And this means hemoglobin A1C. So your blood vessels are carrying, it's about 60% water is the plasma that the blood cells are flowing through. And then you have the blood cells themselves. They have these special things called hemoglobin that allows them to carry oxygen and release oxygen. And what HBA1C is, it's looking at how much of that hemoglobin is stuck to sugar. How much sugar is floating around in your bloodstream because you're eating a high sugar diet and how much of that hemoglobin has sugar stuck to it. And if it's a high amount of that, it shows you have sugar constantly floating around. And guess what happens? Sugar can be massively inflammatory. It can shut down your immune system. So when you're on the spectrum of going pre-diabetic into diabetic, because you're insulin resistant, you're eating lots of sugar, you're destroying your heart. And this is why one of the main consequences of having diabetes is actually having nerve and cardiovascular damage. A lot of people with diabetics have massive increases in incidents of heart attacks, strokes, and peripheral neuropathy, which is damage to the small vessels and that leads to the tingling and numb sensations. So again, sugar in the wrong kinds is literally poison when it comes to nutrition. And it's sticky. And not just this, when the sugar is floating around, it also damages your brain health. There's something called advanced glycation end products, which basically means sugar that's stuck to protein and fats. We find this stuff in the brain with people who have Alzheimer's and dementia, and it's absolutely damaging. So once you start taking an audit right now, a little reflection, what kinds of foods are you eating right now that you know are processed crap on healthy foods or sugary foods that you think are just casual? You don't really think too much of it because everyone does it. Now from the lens of heart health, you literally are creating poison in your body. So now let's look at the other side of the coin when it comes to nutrition. What can you do to actually enhance your heart health? And I think this is really exciting. There are many things you can do. The first things you can do is actually to get more healthy fiber into your diet. And there's two different categories of fiber, and I want you to start to understand this. There's insoluble fiber and there's soluble fiber. Insoluble fiber, I want you to think of as something like kale. It's like plant roughage. It's insoluble, meaning it doesn't actually dissolve and absorb water well. And I want you to contrast the idea of what kale's like, this rough kind of really cellulose type plant thing with something like oatmeal or an apple that's a little spongy. Well, when it comes to heart health, the soluble fiber is actually really powerful because what soluble fiber does when we eat it actually goes into our digestive tract. Our gut bacteria break it down and create a lot of good, healthy byproducts. And it actually binds cholesterol in your body. And when the soluble fiber binds the cholesterol, you end up actually pooping that out. So that's why they show one of the fastest ways to actually improve your cholesterol numbers is to increase your fiber intake. And there's a couple of foods I think are very particularly good for high soluble fiber. The ones that I love, avocado, oatmeal, different kinds of beans, apples, oranges, pears. But if you want to improve your cholesterol specifically, because you know you have high readings and levels, then one thing you can do is get some more soluble fiber into your diet. And I think an easy way to do that is have some with your morning meal, whether you intermittent fast or have breakfast. Could you include an apple as a snack? Could you have, you know, some oatmeal overnight oats in there with dinner? Could you throw a side of some kind of beans or fiber? You increase your soluble fiber about 20 to 30 grams per day. Your cholesterol levels will improve. And again, if you have a lower total cholesterol levels, there's less incidents that they're going to be oxidizing themselves. The next thing with, from a nutritional standpoint, that's massively beneficial for heart health is getting more omega three fatty acids. So we hear about mega threes. We often think that of fish oil, and that's a really good thing to think about because cold water, fatty fish like salmon herring sardines have these special omega three fats. And they're really amazing because one of the things they do is they actually get integrated into the lipid bilayer of all of your cells. The omega threes find themselves in there and allow cells to actually have better exchange and communication because they're a little more fluid. Specifically when it comes down to blood work, I'm taking omega threes raises your HDL, that quote unquote good cholesterol. It actually changes the shape and the size of your LDL, the quote unquote bad cholesterol. It makes the LDL more puffy and big. And what we know from the research is it's just not total cholesterol. It's particle size. You do not want small dense LDLs. You want big puffy ones. Omega threes do that. So specifically, if you're not actually taking some kind of omega three supplement, you could consider doing that for heart health. What I also know from the research is really good is just having some cold water, fatty fish a couple of times per week, try to get some wild salmon, try to get some sardines, avoid some of the seafood that's really high in mercury. Like personally, I would never eat, you know, swordfish, too much tuna, tile, fish, shark, some of these bigger things. Sure. They may have some of these beneficial vitamins, minerals, omega threes, but the mercury is a bad thing. Now there are omega threes in plant-based sources like hemp seeds and chia seeds. They just come in a different form. That's not as bioavailable, but if you eat enough of them, you can still get some good benefit. And as we're going to talk about hemp seeds and chia seeds in particular are going to come up in just a little bit as super heart healthy foods that I highly recommend most people put into their diet for a slightly different reason. Now, the next thing that's really good for heart health is to get enough of our fat soluble vitamins. So there's two different class and compounds of vitamins. There's vitamins that are water soluble and vitamins that are fat soluble. And not surprisingly, the vitamins that are fat soluble are found in more fatty type foods and the water soluble vitamins like the B vitamins and vitamin C are found in different kinds of foods. Well, the fat soluble vitamins are vitamin A, D, E, and K. And we want more of these for really good heart health. And I'm going to explain some of the science with this. The best places to get these are actually found in liver. We're seeing a big movement right now in nutrition where a lot of people are saying, eat more organ meats. And the reason being these organ meats naturally concentrate these fat soluble vitamins and they're so, so healthy. So things like calf liver, cod liver oil, things like whole pasture raised eggs, wild caught fatty fish, and even your dark green leafy vegetables, things like things like your spinach, things like your kale, your collard greens, your chard. These have some of those fat soluble vitamins. We want more of these. So, so good for your heart health. Now, I want to really zoom in on vitamin D3, because this is something a lot of us know is very beneficial. I'm a huge proponent of as much as we can for not just heart health, but overall health is getting sunshine on our skin before noon. If we can get 10, 15 minutes, if that's possible, I know there's seasonal effects that we can't necessarily always get the sun depending on where I live, but if we can, that's very great. Otherwise we want to make sure we're getting enough vitamin D3 because it affects all these different functions, immune strength, brain strength, bone, teeth. And one of them, vitamin D3's main roles is actually to help the body absorb more calcium from the gut. And calcium is super important as it relates to heart health. The heart uses calcium as one of these key minerals to actually have electrical activity and contract. Now, one of the interesting things is when we have inflammation in our vessels and we get things to be damaged, one of the things the body does is actually lays down calcium deposits in our arteries. In fact, if you go to your doctor and they're looking for some of these more advanced markers for heart disease, they may give you something called a coronary calcium score, where they actually are able to measure the amount of calcium that's deposited in your arteries. And when your arteries get very thick and when they get very hardened because calcium's deposited, that's problematic. We want arteries that can expand and contract and are more fluid and pliable. We don't want a highly pressurized, stiff artery. So one of the cool things is we can pair vitamin K2 with D3. And what K2 does is it actually clears out bad calcium from your arteries. So this is like a key point in this video. You may not even be aware that vitamin K2 exists, but you want to take this alongside D3. So for every 1,000 IUs of D3 you may take supplementally, I recommend you get 100 micrograms of K2. Now, there are some food sources of K2. It's actually a product of bacterial fermentation. K2 is found in liver. It's found in butter. It's found in fermented products like natto, sauerkraut. It's even found in chicken thighs and chicken legs. Or you can supplement with it and make it very simple. They have D3, K2 combination supplements. If you're looking at maximizing your heart health, you need to look at calcium and K2 is a huge factor when it comes to nutrition of that. And a couple other things on the nutrition front, because I want to cover a lot of these different aspects, sleep, exercise, et cetera, is it may be beneficial for you to try some intermittent fasting. This is the strategic process of actually compressing your eating window and having a large number of hours per day where your body's in a fasted state. This is super beneficial because in a fasted state, your body does reduce inflammation. Fasting is also very helpful for weight loss. It helps control your appetite. It increases human growth hormone, which is repairing for your vessels and your organs. And we also know that if you're carrying a high amount of like visceral fat, fat that's around your belly that also wraps around your organs, that is massively inflammatory. And fasting can be a really good tool coupled with good nutrition to get rid of some of that fat. And one final thing I'll say on nutrition is drink more high quality water, more of this. Remember your blood is made up of red blood cells and proteins, as well as the plasma, the fluid it floats through. 60% of that, the blood is roughly water. So if you can hydrate more, get your body to be a nice filtration system and get good quality minerals into that water, your heart is going to be so beneficial. So what I recommend is when you wake up in the morning, start your day off with the blessing of 20 to 32 ounces of nice clean water. Get that within one hour of waking up, get that water in. And you can actually mineralize your water with some trace mineral drops or about a quarter teaspoon of some pink Himalayan sea salt. Get this stuff and the minerals in the water and drink water throughout the day. It's going to help your heart health tremendously. And I want to one more thing before we close up this nutrition section of this episode is the importance of the mineral magnesium. Most people today are totally deficient in magnesium and it is one of the most important minerals period for heart health. Magnesium works in two ways. One, the heart literally uses magnesium to create ATP and energy and contract. So that seems kind of important. But two, the magnesium actually helps relax those blood vessels, those blood vessels that get stiff, stressed and hardened up. And so we want to get magnesium rich foods. And this is why inside our fit father and fit mother programs, we sneakily add in a lot of magnesium rich foods into the meal plan. So some of the morning breakfast smoothies we recommend, they have cacao powder, a high quality organic cacao powder, dark chocolate, and cacao, one of the richest sources of magnesium. We also recommend people throw baby spinach into shakes and smoothies, or put that on the side of some kind of protein later in the day, or mix it in with some salad greens. Spinach and some of these dark green leafies are so rich in magnesium. Hemp seeds and cheese seeds, as I mentioned before, also rich in magnesium. Almonds rich in magnesium. So a lot of these foods that we know are healthy, the reason they're so good for our health is they have these key kinds of minerals as well as healthy fats and they help reduce inflammation. Get more magnesium. Get at least 400 milligrams of magnesium. I think it's fine if you go out and actually use a magnesium supplement. There's many good things. And in fact, inside some of the supplements we formulate for our program members, fit fathers and fit mothers, we include magnesium in our men's test booster. We include magnesium inside our women's balance supplement because it's so beneficial for overall health. So magnesium, get more of that. Now let's switch gears. We talked a lot about nutrition, things to avoid, things to include. I want to actually talk about something that's super overlooked when it comes to heart health, and that is your sleep. The research is so abundantly clear. This is actually a direct quote from the CDC. Adults who sleep less than seven hours per night are more likely to have heart health problems, including heart attack, high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, atherosclerosis, asthma, and depression. And the connection of sleep to your heart health really comes down to this simple fact, that your nervous system, right? We have this brain that goes down the spinal cord and has all these nerves, has two main modes. It has the sympathetic, activated, stress-activated system, which is good for short bursts, and it has the parasympathetic, rest and digest system that slows the heart rate, is more relaxing on the blood vessels. So sympathetic raises blood pressure, raises heart rate, gets us ready to activate, and that's when we're stressed, or when we're exercising, good in short bursts. Parasympathetic, we want that kind of dominance. What happens when we miss sleep is this whole balance of the nervous system gets massively shifted into sympathetic. Our cortisol levels end up being very high. Our metabolism parameters get jacked up, and we're in this constantly stressed state, which means the heart needs to beat harder, and we have higher blood pressure, which, as we know, is going to create problems over time. This is why sleep is just so essential. If you're looking at improving your health, as long as your heart health, we need to get to the core of helping you improve your sleep. And this is also why people who have sleep disorders, like sleep apnea, they're overweight, they're not breathing well, they're waking up constantly, have a massive increase in incidents of heart attacks and strokes. Sleep is critical for keeping your nervous system balanced. So anything you can do to increase the duration and the quality of your sleep is massive. And we have tons of videos here on our Fit Father and Fit Mother channels, as well as our podcasts on how to improve your sleep. Things like using blue blocking glasses at night, cooling down the temperature of your room. I'm not going to get into all that. You can find some links around our channel, and you can even go to some of our playlists around sleep if you're watching on YouTube and stuff like that to check that out. But just know, sleep is as vital as everything else on this list for improving your heart health. Next thing I want to talk about is daily exercise. I mentioned in the beginning of this episode that the heart is a muscle, so we need to work it. And in my opinion, there's really three types of exercise we want to do for heart health. The first one is good old-fashioned aerobic exercise. This is basically just the process of gently elevating our heart rate. Not to the point where it's like crazy high intensity, but maybe we're jogging, maybe we're on a brisk hike, maybe we're playing pickleball, or we're going around running around with our kids, we're swimming, we're biking, we're doing something that's just a gentle rise in our heart rate. And ideally, we're doing it in such a zone where we can still breathe through our nose, and we can still have a conversation with someone. That kind of exercise is just so beneficial for the heart, this low-intensity aerobic activity. The human physiology, we're built to run, we're built to move. It's one of our great things of our physiology. And what research actually recommends is that you get at least 150 minutes of aerobic exercise a week. So that's really like five days a week of 30 minutes. And you could break this up. It doesn't have to be all at once. Maybe you do a couple aerobic workouts, but this is just another benefit to you going out and getting some of this stuff in. This can be paired with other types of exercise we're going to talk about as well. The second kinds of exercise is actually critical for very different reasons. It's high-intensity exercise, particularly strength training. So strength training is so good because it activates our muscles. It's higher in intensity. It uses different metabolic pathways. And over time, as we build muscle, we have a stronger metabolism. And faster metabolism, it's easier for us to maintain a lower weight to get rid of fat. And it actually helps activate some of these mitochondria inside of our heart to regenerate and to be strong. So we need a combination of cardio and strength training together. And this is why here at Fit Father and Fit Mother Project, the type of exercise we really recommend for people who are busy, who don't have time to just do workouts like this all over the time, is called metabolic resistance training. It's basically aerobics and strength training combined. So it's doing the good strength training exercises like squats, shoulder presses, rows, push-ups, burpees, swings, and doing it in a circuit. So you're getting the strength and the cardio and the functional movement all in one. And these sessions can be done in 20, 30, 40 minutes. And you can do them two, three times a week and hit all of your parameters for health. So for busy people, I recommend MRT workouts a couple of times a week. All of our programs that you may join and buy are based off of this. A lot of our free workouts on our channels and our podcast, YouTube, are based off of this. So I recommend you do that. Think about getting at least a couple boluses of this high-intensity type of workouts a couple weeks. It only needs to be two or three. And the sessions aren't that long, 30 minutes. You can do them with a pair of dumbbells, kettlebells, and a few feet of floor space. So it's not like there's a huge obstacle to you getting this done. You just got to really make a point of understanding the connection about why this is important and scheduling it in. And then what I believe is actually the most important type of exercise for overall heart health is actually daily walking, particularly getting outside, ideally when there's sunshine, breathing through your nose, and walking. Research shows that walking dramatically improves your heart health, lowers your blood pressure, shifts your nervous system into this relaxed, parasympathetic tone, increases endorphins that make you feel good, helps you feel more connected to nature. And as we're going to talk about in the next section, when you breathe through your nose, a lot of amazing things actually happen to your arteries. They actually start to dilate due to something called nitric oxide. So walking is just some of the best medicine. If you can walk every single day, I don't think there's like any amount to how much you could walk where you go and get additional benefits. What I personally do in the morning is before I actually start my work and get down on my computer and do stuff like that, I'm taking a 30 minute minimum, I'd say 20 minutes minimum, but ideally up to like 30, 45 minute walk. I take my dog, I take my baby, we get outside, we get some sunshine, I breathe through my nose, such a good habit. So walk more and ideally walk with your family, really good for your overall health. Now let's talk about one of the most important signaling molecules for overall heart health. It's called nitric oxide. What nitric oxide is, it's one of the simplest gases in the body. It is a nitrogen paired with an oxygen. And your body uses nitric oxide for many functions, but one of its main functions is actually to dilate all of your arteries and small vessels. Because when you have a larger artery that more blood can flow through more easily, more oxygen exchange can happen, you have greater fitness. And what we found is nitric oxide levels naturally decrease with age. And there are a few things that increase nitric oxide levels and you want the highest nitric oxide levels that your body can naturally produce. One thing, exercise, right? So that's why we talked about the massive benefits. Another thing, breathing through your nose. There are actually receptors inside your nose and when you breathe through your nose, it naturally releases nitric oxide, which helps give you more vasodilation, helps get those blood vessels opened up. A couple other crazy things I recently learned about nitric oxide I want to share with you, is there's actually bacteria that live on the back of your tongue that produce nitric oxide for us. Fascinating, right? This whole system is so interconnected. This is why we've known for a long time that bad oral health is actually connected to bad heart health. When people have root canals or too much plaque or any kind of bad stuff with the mouth, it actually creates inflammation in some of the vessels of the heart. So specifically, I interviewed last year, one of the world's foremost experts and PhDs on nitric oxide. And he gave me some really interesting advice. One thing he says is stop using mouthwash. If you're someone who uses antiseptic mouthwash, you're actually killing the bacteria on the back of your tongue that produce nitric oxide for you. And he said that fluoride toothpaste does this as well, even to a lower level. And he took a healthy person in his lab, a healthy man in his lab who like regularly exercises, does not use mouthwash. He had him use mouthwash every day for, I think, one to two weeks and was able to make him hypertensive. Just by using mouthwash, not changing anything else, raised his blood pressure enough that he was classified as being hypertensive. And then when he stopped the mouthwash, it took a while, but the bacteria came back into his mouth and he was able to have a lower blood pressure. So there are intimate effects. This body is so connected and I find it fascinating. Anything you do to increase nitric oxide levels, very, very good. Breathing through your nose. Believe it or not, the practice of even humming, closing your mouth and humming, stimulates those bacteria on the back of your tongue to produce nitric oxide. There's actually real research on this. So there's a little deep rabbit hole you can get down on nitric oxide. Another thing to consider is a lot of the foods we've talked about, those dark green leafy vegetables, beets, celery, have natural nitrates that the bacteria in the back of your mouth actually use to produce nitric oxide. So I think that's fascinating, too. Another good reason. There's a big trend where people like to juice beets and juice celery and stuff like that. It's because they have these nitrates and they lead to so many great health benefits. So optimize your nitric oxide levels. And if you're curious, there's actually some test strips you can buy on Amazon or certain stores where they can test the amount of nitric oxide producing bacteria you have on your tongue. And over time, by doing some practices, you can actually increase that. Last year, when I got on this deep nitric oxide train, I actually started to test my own saliva and I found that I was in the slightly depleted range. And I began to make some of these changes, increase my intake of nitrates, breathe through my nose, do some more humming, take some more cold plunges. And I found that now I'm in the optimal range. So even me, a healthy guy, had some things to do with nitric oxide. Now, the last few bits of this are going to be a little more straightforward and we'll be a little quick through this. The next factor that's absolutely essential for heart health is you have to stop smoking and you should really drink a lot less. So I don't know if you are a smoker, but smoking is probably the number one thing that damages your heart and your vessels. In cigarette smoke in particular, there's over 4,000 different chemical compounds, 400 of which are absolutely toxic for that intimate layer of your blood vessels that creates the inflammation. Your body responds by laying down plaque. You get less efficient oxygen exchange. So smoking pretty much just jacks you up. You probably know this, but if you are still smoking, just know that you're probably totally destroying your heart health and raising your cancer risk. So smoking and heart health are just not compatible. And that's why you go into any doctor's office. They're always going to ask you, how long have you smoked? What's your pack per year history? Blah, blah, blah. It's because that's a serious factor. And then drinking is another thing too. Like it can be enjoyed in moderation, but remember drinking puts a stress on the liver itself, which is completely tied to this blood system. The liver is effectively working with the kidneys to filter things out of the blood. And so we're putting stress on the liver. Stuff can build up in the blood, damaging for the heart. But I think more compelling reason not to drink too much, if at all, is the fact that alcohol literally causes the neurons in your brain to shrink and to work far less efficiently. It decreases your memory, your coordination, your balance. It's a complete neurotoxin. And look, I have occasional drinks. My wife likes to drink. So I'll have a drink with her once in a while, but I really don't seek out drinks as a way to de-stress. I use other things, exercise, certain kinds of supplements like magnesium, cold plunges, hot sauna, more natural ways that actually give me health benefits as opposed to damaging my health, particularly my brain health. So smoking and drinking are really not that compatible with health. Then the final good news is what they found is that, and I find this so amazing and emotional and a little bit spiritual, is that having great connections, having a sense of purpose and gratitude is one of the best things you can do for your heart health. You've probably heard these stories of people that live to like 110 years old and they drink alcohol every day, eat chocolate, and maybe even smoke. A lot of these people do have good social connections. And there is some research by a guy named Daniel Buettner who did this thing called Blue Zone Study, where he studied all the people that lived the longest, these pockets of longevity around the world, Okinawa, Japan, Sardinia, Italy, Loma Linda, California. And one of the things all these people had in common is they had a deep sense of community and purpose. They came together. And this is really cool because if we think of the heart, when we say, I heart you, I love you, we think of feeling. We think of connection, not just this muscle that's mechanically pumping. There's something deeper to this heart that is our feeling center in a sense. And when we really feel like we are connected and we have gratitude, our system is physiologically in a less stressed state. We get different neurotransmitters and neurochemicals released in the system that helps us feel healthy and relaxed. And we're not in this fight or flight jamming system where the heart is working overly so hard. So anything you do to foster deeper social connections, they find that people who are in happy marriages live a lot longer, have less heart disease. So understand that the heart is not just a biochemical process and a mechanical process, but it's also an emotional process, how we relate to our lives. I know we covered a lot in this video. I think this might be a video that you go back and watch certain sections. Again, I want to give like a really quick summary and recap to give you some ideas on what's going on here. So again, really focus on your nutrition, get rid of all the bad inflammatory stuff, the sugars, the trans fats, all that, and then get the good stuff in focus on the magnesium, the omega threes, the healthy fats, the dark green leafy vegetables, hemp seeds, chia seeds, avocado, cold water, fatty fish, get those fat soluble vitamins, maybe start eating some liver, get out in the sunshine, try to intermittent fast and release, reduce your visceral fat. And then when it comes to exercise, right? Daily walking is key. Walk more, sprinkle in high intensity exercise. And if you love certain kinds of aerobics, particularly if it's play for you, go out and play, play pickleball, ride your bike, go jog, get outside with your family. There's so many benefits for both the social connection and the activity and breathe through your nose as much as you can. We want to optimize those nitric oxide levels. Get rid of your mouthwash. If you're using it, consider switching to a natural toothpaste. If you really want to go down the rabbit hole on this stuff, eat more of the foods that have those natural nitrates that increase nitric oxide, celery, beets. Personally, my wife makes me some fresh pressed juice. I'm a lucky man. A few times a week. And I know I'm getting these great nitrates and so good for my heart health. And then obviously smoking and drinking are kind of off the table. If you really want to optimize heart health, then work on your social connections and your sense of purpose. This heart health stuff is a holistic process. It's so intimately connected. I hope you found this valuable today inside this episode. And I want to let you know, if you want like more direct help on this, like to take all this information that's interesting to know and distill it down to an exact battle plan, like what to do step-by-step with the meal plan, with the workouts, with the proper supplements, we have complete Fit Father and Fit Mother programs. They're going to be linked in the description. They're absolutely life-changing. The best thing you can do for yourself is to invest in a holistic health program. My team and I, we figured this out. We'd love to help you in the programs. And if you want to really try us out and literally get a taste for what we're all about, there's some free meal plans and workouts in the description as well. And I hope this was very valuable, my friend. This is Dr. A signing off. I'll see you in future episodes, and I'll talk to you very soon.