Young Sudden Cardiac Death: Prevention Starts In Childhood

How come it’s possible for a 20 year old sporty person to have a heart attack? Why is heart disease the world’s biggest killer? Can nutrition help you stop it?

Stories you hear

You can’t believe when you hear in the news information about sudden death of a young person from heart attack. Often when it relates to a sport athlete. But statistics are more horrifying, highlighting the importance of maintaining a healthy heart.

Young Sudden Cardiac Death (YSCD) demonstrated from their research that in the UK a 12 young people die every week from undiagnosed cardiac conditions.

Being physically active or not is not the indicator of premature heart condition death in young people. Cardiovascular diseases are not developed in teenage years, early 20’s or 30’s. Professionals inform us that cardiovascular diseases develop much earlier, at the childhood stage and. In the childhood stage a cardiovascular inflammations and other accumulation occur upon poor nutrition intake leading to a tragic situation in later years.

What that means is that heart attack prevention must start in childhood.

When you’ve been a child, you have developed various habits, especially eating habits. Naturally you will find them very hard to change as you grow. It doesn’t mean that they are impossible for you to change, all I’m saying is that it’s difficult as they have created your ‘default’ system of habits.

So if you have children or grandchildren you can’t say ‘I ate this when I was his/her age’ as this no longer stands the ground.

There is no reason why children shouldn’t have whole milk for breakfast or whole grain bread for lunch.

Excuses of ‘everybody has pizza so we’ll have it 2-3 times per week because after all they are children’ no longer stands the ground either.

Best thing you can give to your children (and your family) is cardiovascular protection. One they will maintain throughout their life via habit you built in their default behavioural system.

Heart disease symptoms

What actually happens when you feel a severe chest pain (called angina)? Well, this occurs generally from a lack of blood supply of oxygen to the heart muscle. You can also feel chest discomfort, chest pressure in the form of heaviness or a tight feeling in your chest. Those feelings can be stable or unstable.

Stable means it can happen during or after physical exercise even in young people.

Try not to diminish symptoms by selling to yourself some silly explanations like:

‘oh, I got this tightness because I haven’t stretched out’ or
‘I didn’t keep my exercise rhythm stable’.

You should be checking if those symptoms get worse during cold weather or when you have a full stomach. They usually last 3-5 minutes in duration. Alongside you can experience some short breathing but overall it will get better with a bit of rest.

Unstable phases occur even at rest and they are longer. If you have medications from your doctor you can feel that they don’t always work in terms of reducing your symptoms.

Alongside chest pain you may also experience pain in the jaw, back, upper abdominal, neck, shoulders. You may sometimes confuse heartburn with angina.

What nutrition has to do with this?

Imaging a sticky substance made up of cholesterol, fat, blood cells, and other substances. Yes, such thing exist in your body and it’s called plaque. When the plaque in blood vessels builds up then your blood flow gets restricted. This situation deprives your heart muscle from oxygen. When your heart muscle is lacking oxygen then other organs (like the brain for example) will start lacking too.

Having a poor nutrition diet (one that is high in fats and trans fats) causes damage to artery walls (this is also called an oxidised LDL cholesterol). This LDL cholesterol enters the artery wall and causes a whole process of inflammation. When this occurs your immune system sends white blood cells to rescue and absorb the build up in artery walls. However, if your bad eating habits continue then inflammation starts causing damage to the arteries wall. That is why fixing a fatty but quick meal for young people is the worse thing you can do for them.

What is wrong with this cholesterol?

Too much of good thing is bad for you. This includes cholesterol. When cholesterol enters the artery wall it is making the smooth wall of artery to enlarge. This then leads to a structural problem with your heart and restricts the heart ability to provide blood flow to the whole body. As a result you experience heart failure.

Fat food restricts blood flow in vein leading to heart problems

Think about this like a system of pipes in your house. You know very well how blockages build up and how problematic it is to deal with consequences. I need you to think about your toilet blockage. You’ll notice a small blockage now and then but you’ll ignore it when water after some turbulence will eventually run down through the pipe. However if you continue flashing the water while your pipe is blocked – oh boy! You’ll have a proper explosion of everything in the toilet.

Your body is like a system of very complex pipes. If you won’t maintain it with good nutrition intake, if you won’t keep it clean the blockage will eventually build up and the pressure will increase in the artery. So you do have to maintain your artery well from an early age – and studies confirm that. Otherwise it will manifest with life changing consequences or even worse when your heart will not be able to coop.

Early detection

Apart from checking the blood cholesterol markers, there are no symptoms at an early stage and in young people. In the US a study was conducted analysing over 24 million individuals. The result shows that through all people diagnosed with heart problems often the first symptom was the heart attack or sudden cardiac death.

You should take a moment and think. All those people have had warning signs informing them about problems that are coming. So if you’re having your blood checks done and your doctor informs you about your high cholesterol or high triglycerides, you must take it seriously.

High triglycerides are stored in fat cells of slim and bigger people, in young and older. If you regularly eat more calories than you burn and you eat high in carbs food, chances are that you may have high triglycerides. Check your blood and you will know for sure.

Again, high cholesterol is when you eat too much fatty food.

When you are outside of your recommended weight, smoking and drinking alcohol. It can run in the family but it doesn’t mean you should accept it and continue with your habits.

What happens in your body when you have a heart attack?

When you experience a heart attack a severe damage is being done and cell death happens in your arteries wall. This kills your heart tissue. The blood can’t be supplied to your heart because of the blockage of your artery. Your plaque literally explodes and your white blood cells are flying around. They then stick together creating a clot within the artery wall.

You may come to a conclusion that the major cause of heart disease may be the clot causing limitation of the blood flow.

In simple words, when a clot forms around the heart area it is a heart attack. When a clot forms in the brain it is a stroke. Stroke symptoms include vomiting, nausea, dizziness, severe headache.

You know how easily you can mistake those symptoms with other types of diseases. Also, every time you have a headache you don’t think about stroke. But if alongside those symptoms you experience numbness in your legs, hands, or maybe slower speech or vision loss, lack of coordination – those would be symptoms that you shouldn’t ignore.

The worst thing you can do to yourself is to try and find excesses like ‘oh, I think I just stood up too quickly’. Or explaining young person’s symptoms with other senseless excuses. No! Those are your warning signs.

Also if you’ll observe someone experiencing those symptoms. You should call an ambulance asap as you can save someone’s life.

I’ll say it again, routine blood checks will play such an important role here.

They will provide answers to your symptoms and your doctor will navigate you on how to get back on track.

Which nutrition can prevent heart diseases?

Dietary intervention can make miracles. Good nutrition diet and exercise play a key role in prevention of cardiovascular disease.

However, there are few non-modifiable risks like:

Age – most people develop high blood pressure and glucose intolerance
Gender – men are improving at early identification but women have often undiagnosed or undetected symptoms
Genetics – if you know that you have a predisposition then you must be very alerted about your eating habits and lifestyle

The modifiable risk you can make are:

Quit smoking and vaping
Control blood sugar
Control high blood pressure
Control cholesterol
Start moving and eat less

Your nutritional secrets rest with a nutrition balance diet that focuses on eating more of the anti-inflammatory food that reduces inflammation leading to heart disease.

Healthy food in heart shape and exercise equipment

You should complement your diet by controlling your sodium intake. If you think that your food doesn’t taste salty it doesn’t necessarily mean you have a low sodium diet.

Natural sources of nutrition are the best way to introduce them to your body. They provide all those cleaning agents for your pipes I mentioned earlier.

Be mindful about the supplements. For example, increasing calcium intake through supplements may actually increase risk of heart disease and stroke in older women. Studies show that through the ratio of sodium to potassium.

If you want to control your high blood pressure then limiting saturated fats is a good way forward. Also increasing your Omega-6 and Omega-3 fatty acids may help control your blood pressure.