My father says that back when he was young (70s and 80s in India), dying of a heart attack was considered to be a rich man thing.
Poor people would live into their 90s and die slowly of old age, and rich people would die in their 70s before that from a “heart attack”.
In fact, in my hometown, they used to say a man has died “early” if he died before hitting his 90s. Almost all of these guys would die from old age (except a few who got tuberculosis).
Now, almost everyone (even in villages) dies from heart attacks. In fact, I rarely hear of anyone dying of any other non-accident related causes. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard of anyone dying from old age.
It’s always a heart attack and the guys dying are in their 50s, 60s, and 70s. Nowhere close to their 90s.
Last month, my wife lost a relative. He was a 38 year old dude with two young children and a dependent wife. Cause of death? Heart attack. He was a fat guy.
This stuff is unheard of. People are dying younger and younger from a PREVENTABLE cause.
Why Are People Dying From Heart Attacks
Obviously there is no ONE reason why people are having heart attacks. It’s a combination of a few main factors:
1) Vegetable oils
People stopped eating traditional sources of fat such as butter and GHEE and started eating garbage seed oils like vanaspati oil, canola oil, palm oil, soybean oil, etc.
Seed oils are liquid poison and you should avoid them at all costs. There are a few exceptions here and there like coconut oil and cold pressed mustard oil but other than that, the vegetable oils are terrible for your health.
The reason why the food industry uses them everywhere is because they are cheap and shelf stable. Not because it’s healthy, but because it’s cheap and shelf stable.
Vegetable oils are even worse if they have been “refined” which basically means it has been heat treated, probably oxidized, and is laden with the residue of organic solvents. You are literally eating the garbage of industrial factories.
This is how canola oil is made:
Yep, chemically washed, bleached, deodorized. What could be healthier than this industrial sludge?
Notice the many lies in the video – “heart healthy”, “high in omega 3s”, “canola oil is healthier than olive oil“, etc. The food industry loves canola oil because it’s cheap and shelf stable.
Ghee and butter needs lots of cows to produce milk (expensive), reduces the shelf life of factory foods, and has much lower supply than shitty vegetable oils. That’s why they want to psyop you into believing it’s healthy.
Vegetable oils are NOT healthy. Humans evolved eating animal fats like ghee and butter and never had any problems.
Now we’re eating “heart healthy” oils that have been derived from plants, chemically washed in a solvent (usually hexane – a neurotoxin), BLEACHED, deodorized and are told it’s healthy. What a joke.
If you eat vegetable oils, you are eating a highly processed, highly inflammatory, and extremely unhealthy slow poison. You have been warned.
2) Too little activity
For millions of years, humans used to very high levels of physical activity. I’m not even talking about strength related activities, I mean general physical activity like moving around, climbing trees, walking, throwing things, etc.
Back in the day people would walk upwards of 15 kilometers a day. Often with weight on their back.
That’s more than 20,000 steps per day.
Most people today hardly walk 3000 steps a day. Many can’t even walk for 2 hours without complaining about their “feet hurting”.
Most people over 35 haven’t done a full speed sprint in years. If they run, their knees and feet hurt for days. People are that unfit.
All this lack of activity makes their hearts weak. Yes, the heart is a muscle. If you don’t work the muscle, it becomes weaker.
Going to the gym and lifting weights for a few hours a week is not enough.
You also need to do things that get your heart rate up for a sustained time. Incline walking, sprints, swimming, sports, or anything else you like – do your cardio for at least 30 minutes a day.
3) Obesity
What do you get when you have low levels of physical activity but eat tons of carbohydrates in your diet? You become overweight.
The vast majority of people today are overweight. Not everybody but most people.
Even in a less than developed country like India, 70% of the urban population is overweight.
69% of Americans are obese. Even Africa is seeing high obesity rates.
Obesity puts a lot of stress on your heart because it raises blood pressure. Your heart has to work extra hard to pump blood in your large body (not to mention that your lipid profile is likely to be sub-optimal if you are obese).
If you are fat, lose weight. You ideally want to be around 15% body fat. Get a DEXA scan if you don’t know what your body fat percentage is (or use skinfold calipers, but it has a lot of measurement variability).
Note that you don’t have to look fat to be fat. A lot of people are skinny fat (low muscle, high fat) which makes them look skinny when they are clothed but are soft and fat when the clothes come off.
Basically if you look like any of these guys (pictures from the internet), you are obese even though the BMI score won’t show it to you. Get a DEXA scan and you’ll find out the truth.
All the 3 guys in the picture above are obese except that their BMI results will probably read normal and they won’t “look obese”. But really they are obese because they are full of fat and have very little muscle mass – this phenomenon is called being skinny fat.
4) Alcohol
Another huge cause of heart attacks is high alcohol consumption. Ethanol is literally a poison that gets you high. If you want to keep consuming it, that’s fine but you need to know what you’re doing to your body.
Too much alcohol damages your liver and increases visceral fat in your body. Visceral fat is fat around your organs and in your organs (think of fatty liver disease).
Guess what is fatty liver and high visceral fat heavily associated with?
Yep, heart disease. In fact, if you have fatty liver and high triglycerides, you are just one step away from a heart attack.
5) Chronic Stress (too much work, low sleep, anxiety, too much worrying, etc.)
Finally, there’s one last major cause of heart attacks (not counting the COVID vax) and that is HIGH STRESS.
High chronic stress levels means:
- Elevated cortisol levels
- Higher blood pressure
- Lower testosterone levels
- More pressure on your heart
- Increased risk of stroke
- More heart damage
Basically, you are much more likely to die an untimely death if you are constantly in stress.
If this is you, you need to learn to relax and chill out. Learn to rest your brain.
You need to care much less about things that don’t really matter and meditate regularly. Do not ignore high stress.
Chronic stress is a silent killer. You can have everything going for you but if you are a over-stressed type A person, it’s all for nothing because the stress will wreck your health and might even kill you.
Unpopular Opinion: Heart Attack = Slow Motion Suicide
Over the last decade, I’ve had over two dozen conversations that went like this:
“Did you hear xyz is dead?”
“How?”
“Heart Attack”
Every time I hear this, it’s almost always a combination of the 5 things I listed above – vegetable oil based diet, obesity, low activity levels, stress, or alcohol.
The thing is – with the limited exception of people who have congenial heart defects – all of these guys could have seen their heart attack coming a mile away.
People do not “randomly” get heart attacks. No fairy comes and suddenly clogs up your arteries.
If you’re eating shitty oils, drinking alcohol, aren’t moving much, have a high stress life, and are overweight – you KNOW you are going to get a heart attack.
It’s not a question of IF but a question of WHEN.
People who died of heart attacks have committed slow motion suicide.
They ate shitty food, sat for most of their day, saw the fat pile around their body… and did nothing about it.
They kept eating their vegetable oils, kept being stationary, kept their bad habits… and then were “surprised” by a heart attack.
Slow motion suicide. You CHOSE this fate. It’s not an accidental death, it’s suicide.
You can continue to live this way and die DECADES before your natural lifespan, or you can choose a different lifestyle.
Either do it yourself or take my 90 Day Self-Improvement Program that has worked for 10000+ people.
Whatever it is, something needs to change FAST or unlike my wife’s uncle who died at 38 leaving behind his 2 teenage children, it will be you dying and your children crying next to your cold fat corpse.
Until next time.
Your man,
Harsh Strongman