Cardiovascular & Metabolic Health
Get To The Heart Of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Dysfunction
Improving Cardiovascular Health
Cardiovascular disease is one of the leading causes of mortality around the world but there’s a lot that we can do to support heart health before it can develop.
The conventional medicine approach to cardiovascular health often involves medications, many of which can have unpleasant side effects that require more medications to counteract them.
The functional medicine approach focuses on supporting a healthy heart through food as medicine, supplements, herbs, and lifestyle interventions.
Nutrition can play a key role in keeping the heart healthy. Saturated fat and dietary cholesterol have been linked to heart disease for decades but we now know that neither of these is a primary culprit for heart problems.
Other factors that can affect cardiovascular health include stress levels, inflammation, poor gut health, high blood sugar and insulin levels, poor sleep, exposure to heavy metals and toxins, and excess weight.
If you don’t currently have any cardiovascular problems, we use preventative medicine to support your health.
If you have been diagnosed with heart problems, we can use a holistic approach to support your heart health to help you manage it. Rather than masking symptoms of a heart problem, the functional medicine model aims to help the heart to be healthier. This can potentially reduce the need for medications or enable a reduction in dosage.
There is rarely a single cause of cardiovascular problems but we can address factors that can improve your heart health with a personalized action plan that uses food as medicine, supplements and herbs.
Improving Metabolic Health
Our busy, modern lives can wreak havoc on metabolic health. Even people who are a healthy weight can be metabolically unhealthy.
Optimizing metabolic health can support healthy blood sugar levels, triglycerides, cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and weight so that metabolic syndrome is less likely to develop.
Metabolic syndrome is a group of conditions that occur simultaneously, including high blood pressure, high blood sugar, abnormal cholesterol and triglyceride levels and increased body fat around the waist. Although all of these conditions need to be present to be classified as metabolic syndrome, having even a single one can raise the risk of disease, especially heart disease, type 2 diabetes and stroke.
The conventional medicine approach to metabolic health involves the use of medications to regulate blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar once problems have already occurred. These medications can have many side effects.
With functional medicine, we want to reduce or avoid the need for medications by improving metabolic markers. Nutrition, supplements, herbs, and lifestyle interventions can improve metabolic health and decrease the risk of cardiovascular disease. Existing metabolic syndrome can potentially be reversed with a functional medicine approach to metabolic health.
We can provide personalized nutrition support for several linked diseases, including:
- High or low blood pressure
- High LDL cholesterol levels and triglycerides
- High blood sugar levels
- Reducing metabolic markers that can progress to cardiovascular disease
- Reducing the risk of diabetes or managing existing diabetes
- Weight loss, especially from around the waistline
We can work with primary care physicians and doctors to manage cardiovascular and metabolic conditions.
Our functional medicine approach to cardiovascular and metabolic health doesn’t use medications. Our focus is on personalized nutrition, supplements, and herbs that provide a natural, holistic way to reduce the risk of heart disease or manage an existing cardiovascular or metabolic condition.
