Never fear! The key to a healthy heart may consist in combining these two activities.
Perhaps you've tried going on a healthy heart diet and found that you couldn't make much headway. Alternatively, you may have tried doing yoga without addressing your nutritional needs and found that you were not experiencing improvements. Never fear! The key to a healthy heart may consist in combining these two activities.
Anyway, that is the thrust of a study published in the journal Acta Physiologica Scandinavica. Drawn up by researchers at the Department of Epidemiology and Social Medicine in Germany's Hannover Medical University, the paper is blunt: adding a vegetarian diet to a yoga regimen may work wonders.
Coming to this conclusion involved asking dozens of participants to take part in a three-month yoga program designed to keep them active and in shape. These individuals were also fed a healthy daily diet that was based mainly on fruits and vegetables.
The team described this fare as "lacto-vegetarian," since volunteers were given dairy products. Therefore, while not vegan, the diet was quite tightly controlled.
After the study period, researchers found that a number of the participants' health risk factors had dropped precipitously, including their body mass indices, cholesterol and blood pressure. Likewise, their hormone levels had balanced noticeably.
"Urinary excretion of adrenaline, noradrenaline, dopamine, aldosterone, as well as serum testosterone and luteinizing hormone levels were reduced, while cortisol excretion increased significantly," the group noted. These changes indicate that participants may have altered their stress- and anxiety-related hormone levels for the better.
Other studies have reaches similar conclusions. A report appearing in the Journal of Association of Physicians of India found that middle-aged adults who do yoga may experience dips in oxidative stress.
Another paper, this one in the Journal of the American Board of Family Practice, noted that many prior studies have pointed to yoga as a heart health-improving system. Researchers collected a total of 70 previously published reports detailing the positive effects that stretching and deep breathing can have on one's cardiovascular condition.
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Tags: healthy heart, healthy heart diet
