Get Off The Sofa E-Book

Andrew Curran

• Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 136

Beschreibung

For years I have watched people in their millions inflict more illness and suffering on themselves than any war has ever done. What is this biblical plague, this monstrosity of suffering? Self inflicted illness. The fat guy smoking a cigarette. The thin woman flayed raw by alcohol. The kid jamming another fat laden time bomb into its face. The millions and millions of couch potatoes who haven't done a minutes decent exercise since they passed puberty. And what happens to all these millions upon millions of people? Nothing for most of the time.

Leseprobe

To Cara, Michael Patrick,Michael David, Joseph and Noah.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

YOUR HEART

YOUR LUNGS

YOUR LIVER

YOUR DIGESTIVE SYSTEM

YOUR PANCREAS

YOUR KIDNEYS AND BLADDER

YOUR GENITALS

YOUR BONES AND JOINTS AND MUSCLES

YOUR SKIN

YOUR BRAIN

Epilogue

Appendix 1: Classification of Overweight and Obesity by BMI, Waist Circumference and Associated Disease Risks

Appendix 2: The Mediterranean Diet137

Bibliography

FAQs

By the Same Author

Copyright

Preface

Writing this book is my present to me. For years I have watched people in their millions inflict more illness and suffering on themselves than any war has ever done. Both as a practising doctor and as a simple observer of the Saturday afternoon crowds that throng the centre of most cities, I have watched suffering on a scale that is beyond apocalyptic. For years at a time I have been distressed to the core of my being. Sometimes I have watched with indifference. Most of the time I have been nearly inchoate with rage at the blind stupidity of what I am seeing. What is this biblical plague, this monstrosity of suffering? Self-inflicted illness. The fat guy smoking a cigarette. The thin woman flayed raw by alcohol. The kid jamming another fat-laden time bomb into its face. The millions and millions of couch potatoes who haven’t done a minute’s decent exercise since they passed puberty. So what happens to all these millions upon millions of people? Nothing for most of the time. They are just the same as all their friends and their relatives and, God help us, far too many of the health professionals that look after them.

But then it all changes. Sometimes suddenly – a heart attack, stroke, cancer. Life changing, irrevocable events that stuff their lives and the lives of everyone around them. Or not so suddenly – the slow suffocation of emphysema, the long autumn of health related unemployment, the desperate loneliness of congestive cardiac failure. And that doesn’t half wreck the lives of everyone around them.

Is it preventable? Not all of it, no. Some diseases just happen even with the best will in the world. But is a large part of it preventable? Yes, absolutely.

So what’s my point? Ignorance. All this unimaginably vast ocean of suffering is to a greater or lesser extent ignorance. A result of poverty – the poverty of knowledge. The information is out there, no doubt of that. There are vast rain forests worth of health information to deal with the ignorance. But it’s pretty dry stuff by and large. Boffins writing for boffins, or worse, health professionals patronising lay people in politically correct jargonese.

So this book, this indulgence of mine, is my contribution to accessibility. If you don’t like plain English, don’t read it. If you aren’t prepared to apply it to yourself and take responsibility for your own health, don’t read it. It isn’t a book full of references and science. It’s just a book about being healthy.

I hope you enjoy it.

DR ANDREW CURRAN

Chapter 1

Your Heart

In each chapter I am going to tell you about a system in your body. First I’m going to tell you how it works. Then I’m going to tell you how to look after it. Then I’m going to tell you how to wreck it. Simples.

What Does Your Heart Do?

The heart is a pump. Nothing more and nothing less. Just a pump.

It is not where love resides nor is it the repository of your emotions. That is just so much Walt Disney. Blood flows into the heart from a great big vein called the vena cava (coming from the body) on the right and another huge vein called the pulmonary vein (coming from the lungs) on the left. It keeps flowing until the big pumping chambers, the ventricles, are nearly full. Then the two atria contract and force the last little bit of blood into the ventricles through the mitral valve on the left and the tricuspid valve on the right. This fills the ventricles right to the top. Once they are full, the ventricles contract. The ventricles (unlike the atria) have really thick, strong walls.

Their contraction slams the mitral and tricuspid valves shut and forces the blood out through the pulmonary valve into the lungs on the right and through the aortic valve into the body on the left.

When you are resting this happens 60–80 times a minute. When you are taking what your body finds to be heavy exercise this can happen as often as 200 times a minute.

So there you have it. A simple four chamber, parallel flow pump.

So what happens to all that blood? Blood from the right ventricle is pumped out into the lungs, or rather into the blood vessels that direct blood to the correct places in the lungs. Those ‘correct places’ are called the alveoli. They are the air spaces in your lungs where you get rid of a gas called carbon dioxide (which is a poison if you have too much of it in your blood) and take in oxygen (which you need to stay alive) – you probably knew that! The blood flows on through the lungs (now full of oxygen and having got rid of its carbon dioxide) and back to the left side of your heart. From there it is pumped out into your body. This is a pretty impressive bit of pumping. You have miles and miles of blood vessels in your body estimated at between 50,000 and 100,000 miles. The left side of your heart not only gets enough pressure going to force your blood out through all those miles of blood vessels, but it keeps enough of a pressure head up to get it all the way back to the right side of your heart. Once it reaches there, off it goes again into the lungs to start the whole process all over.

Out there in your body the blood gives up its precious cargo of oxygen to your cells so they can do all the work they have to do. It also picks up all that poisonous carbon dioxide to carry it back to your lungs to get rid of it.

But blood doesn’t just do that.

It is after all the most precious fluid in your body. As an adult you have about 5 litres of the stuff. Actually it’s mostly water with bits and pieces floating in it. Dissolved in the water are all the salts (like sodium and potassium) and a whole pile of what are called trace elements like selenium and zinc which are essential to maintain the health of your cells. Floating in the water (as opposed to being dissolved in it) are lots of other things. Proteins hang out there. These range from simple proteins like antibodies (which are the guided missiles of your immune system) to complex beautifully structured protein moieties like the complement system, a collection of proteins that are crucial to getting your blood to clot. But even bigger things float around in your blood. Red blood cells are bi-concave discs that are responsible for carrying oxygen around the body. They contain haemoglobin, an über-specialist protein that actually carries an iron molecule wrapped in its coils. There are the white blood cells, mindless aggressors that target and destroy any foreign proteins they find, like bacteria and viruses. And finally there are all the rich variety of cell foods and building blocks like dextrose and amino acids and fatty acids. It’s a real wonderland your blood.

Blood vessels also come in a variety of sizes.

There are the huge arteries of the thorax, the aorta and its subsidiaries like the subclavians, the carotids, the mesenterics and their kin. Vast veins carry the slow flow of deoxygenated blood back to the heart, the biggest of which is the venae cavae fed by the femorals, the renal and the hepatic veins to name but a few. Once into your tissues the arteries get gradually smaller until they end up as the tiny capillaries networked through all your organs to supply food and oxygen to even the fartherest away of your cells, and to pick up the poisons and waste products they are exuding.

These tiny capillaries then gradually join together to form bigger and bigger veins until they disgorge their cargo of blood into the massive venae cavae.

Blood vessel walls are very special as well. They have to be smooth but tough – able to withstand the constant pounding of your heart’s beating. They have a wonderfully slick inner lining, the endothelium (endo just means ‘inside’ and thelium means ‘skin’). Wrapped around this is a layer of connective tissue and wrapped around that are variable degrees of muscle wall, depending on how much pressure that particular artery has to withstand (veins are very low pressure vessels and therefore don’t need a muscle coat). The tiny capillaries don’t have any of this. They just have single cell thick walls. This allows all the good stuff in the blood (like oxygen and sugar) to get out of the capillary and into the cell, and all the bad things the cell has been producing to get into the blood so it can be taken away and got rid of.

So your blood has a lot of stuff to do.

And your heart is the pump that keeps it all flowing to the right places and in the right direction.

The entire system is called the cardiovascular system (cardio means ‘heart’ and vascular means ‘the blood vessels’).

How Do I Look After My Heart?

Looking after your heart and blood vessels is probably one of the most important things you can do with your life. After all no oxygen and foodstuffs to your cells and, no big surprise, your cells get sick. If there is a really poor supply of oxygen and foodstuffs to your cells they don’t just get sick, they die. This is a bad thing (obviously). It isn’t just getting oxygen and foodstuffs to your cells though. As I mentioned above, you also have to get rid of the poisons that your cells are manufacturing – the carbon dioxide and all the other plethora of bad stuff that normal cell metabolism produces. (Metabolism means the work the cell does on growing and staying healthy. It also means the stuff that specialist cells like liver and kidney cells do to keep your entire body healthy.)

So let’s take the cardiovascular system as a whole as it is a completely interdependent structure. The question is therefore:

‘How do I look after my cardiovascular system?’

Keeping your cardiovascular system healthy and strong comes down to three main things:

Exercise it.

Feed it properly.

Don’t poison it (I’ll deal with this in the section on wrecking it).

Exercise

Shock horror from all you couch potatoes. Hands thrown up all you IT keyboard thumpers. Sorry to disappoint. Watching Steven Seagal or a good game of footie or trashing an opposition player on Team Fortress 2 may be stimulating and exciting but it is not exercise. It is perhaps one of the great tragedies of the human condition that exercise (like going to the toilet) cannot be indulged in vicariously.

You have to get up and actually do it!

Before I talk more about the specifics of exercise let’s deal with a couple of urban myths.

Urban Myth 1

Exercise can only support weight loss. It is not an effective way to lose weight. Here is the maths: get on an exercise bike. Work at your peak heart rate for 25 minutes. Look at the calories burnt on the little dial on the machine. It will say somewhere around 300 calories burnt. Fantastic you say to yourself. You jump off the cycle machine, rush to the changing room, shower off the sweat. In the car going home that burger from McDonald’s is just what you need. After all you have earned it. All that sweat and exercise. And 300 calories burnt off! Fantastic. You order your Big Mac. You bite into it. Tastes good? Tastes fantastic. It contains 490 calories. Bummer! You just put back in the calories you had burnt off and then added 190 more.

Try something else. Go on. Something really healthy.

A crispy chicken and bacon salad? Why not. Oops! 320 calories. Stuck all the calories back in and added 20 more. So something liquid instead. A coffee can’t have that many calories. So you order your caffè latte prepared with whole milk. Swig it down. YUM! Sorry. 260 calories. A caffè mocha? 400 calories.

So exercise is not a good way of losing weight.

It may have some effect in reducing appetite because it increases things called endorphins in the brain. But really when you do the maths it is pretty useless as a way of losing weight.

Urban Myth 2

Twenty minutes exercise three times a week is enough. Actually no it isn’t. It is certainly a place to start if you haven’t exercised for a while. And it may do some good. But if you really want to look after your cardiovascular system, and especially your heart, you should take moderate to strenuous exercise for 45 minutes to an hour at least three times a week and preferably four to five times a week – and you should keep doing this for your whole life! There are entire legions of octogenarians in countries like the United States who are still working out four to five times per week. I would say that the guidelines most governments issue are rather less than this. But they don’t want to put you off. They want to get you started. This is a good thing. But for your own sake don’t settle for the ordinary. That’s what they are asking you to do. Be extraordinary instead. Honestly, it’s much healthier.

Why exercise at all?

Well, your heart is a muscle the same as any other muscle. To make muscles fit you exercise them. Another simple bit of maths. The resting heart rate is about 60–80 beats per minute depending on how fit you are. Double that to 120–160 and, hey presto, your heart muscle is working twice as hard. Keep that going for 45 minutes and your heart muscle has had a pretty good workout. Also, and very interestingly, exercise increases your body’s production of a type of fat called high density lipoprotein (HDL). This is a good thing as it helps lower cholesterol levels in the blood. And that slows down the narrowing of your arteries that is called atherosclerosis. I’m going to talk a lot more about this below under ‘How Do I Wreck My Cardiovascular System?’ so just accept this in the meantime.

So what is physical fitness?

It’s such a commonly used word but it’s a bit hard to define. In fact it is so hard to define that the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports, and Nutrition (a group sponsored by the United States Government) refused to give a simple definition. Instead they said that ‘physical fitness is a state of well-being with low risk of premature health problems and energy to participate in a variety of physical activities’. Cool! So does that apply to you?

A general purpose fitness programme must address the following six essentials if it is to be considered complete:

Cardiovascular fitness

Flexibility training

Strength training

Muscular endurance

Body composition

General skill training.

People often don’t exercise because they don’t enjoy it. That is of course a very fair comment. The bottom line is though that you will enjoy chronic ill health a lot less than taking regular exercise. Your choice.

Diet

Oh no! Here we go again. Well yes. I’m not trying to make believe that being healthy is easy. It just isn’t. It takes work and dedication. It takes time – time that can be hard to find in busy life schedules. Diet however is easy. You eat every day; most people eat three times a day. And eating is already part of your normal schedule. So what you eat offers a very real and doable way of looking after your health.