Exploring Heart Health Through a Holistic Lens

Let’s explore heart palpitations + high blood pressure through a holistic lens.

Your God designed heart is part electrical, part biochemical, part muscle, and part emotional/spiritual.

In this post, we will be exploring the electrical + biochemical components of your heart health. Electrically speaking, you have a heart rhythm. A normal heart rhythm is called sinus rhythm:

Ideally, we want your heart to be in a normal rhythm, but there are variations that can occur biochemically that can lead to an abnormal rhythm (too fast, too slow, or irregular), such as electrolyte imbalances.

If you have heart palpitations + high blood pressure, yet have been told your blood labs are normal + you just need to “lower your stress + lose weight.” Those are key components and do need to be addressed, but here is something else I would explore: mineral imbalances via a Hair Mineral Analysis test.

Here is why:

Potassium, sodium, magnesium, + calcium are all essential for optimal heart health. Low potassium, is a key contributor to an imbalanced heart rhythm + high blood pressure. Many people are deficient in potassium today and there are various reasons for this:

• Lack of potassium rich foods in the diet

• Over supplementing with sodium leaning electrolytes

• Over eating highly processed foods

• Unaddressed chronic stress, just to name a few.

Low potassium is often missed, until a person is hospitalized because it is only checked routinely via blood. A hair mineral analysis can catch low potassium early. It also gives insight into the relationship between essential electrolytes + minerals in your body. For example: an imbalanced sodium to potassium radio can lead to high blood pressure + heart palpitations.

This is because we have something called a sodium/potassium pump which is highly influenced by chronic stress + mineral depletion. Stress raises tissue sodium by releasing a hormone called aldosterone. Aldosterone is produced by the adrenal glands and it plays a role in regulating blood pressure + fluid balance in the body.

Aldosterone also helps your kidneys retain sodium + fluid and excrete potassium. Both acute and chronic stress will impact sodium levels, which impact aldosterone levels, which eventually leads to potassium loss and then leads to a cascade of other symptoms as additional minerals are impacted along the way. This is often why health care providers will tell people with high blood pressure to “lower their sodium intake.” But we need sodium, and lowering it without addressing potassium can actually lead to more harm than good.

A key piece of addressing heart health is addressing mineral balance + long term stress.

An HTMA (hair mineral analysis)can give you huge insight into where you are currently at in your journey + help create a tangible plan for moving forward.

Stay tuned for more posts on heart health!

Interested in a personalized HTMA reading? Request a test + session with Megan here.

Resources:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8989702/

https://www.traceelements.com

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0009898113000405