Spice Up Your Life and Live Longer
If you found it a little hard to believe that the likes of fish oil and Bran Buds could be good for your heart, how would you feel if I told you that hot red peppers were heart helpers, too? Believe it. Medical researchers in Bangkok, Thailand, have found that hot peppers, or capsicum, as they’re also known, may well contain a substance that could turn out to be tomorrow’s miracle drug. While capsicum is scalding your tongue, it seems, it’s also cooling commotion in your blood vessels. This fiery little vegetable, grown and relished throughout much of the world, now seems to be able to help protect against thromboembolism, a potentially fatal blockage of a blood vessel by a clot transported by the bloodstream from some other part of the body.
Capsicum, the Thai doctors found, causes an increase in fibrinolytic activity (FA), a natural process that helps resist the formation of large and dangerous clots by dissolving them when they’re still small. Amazingly, they also found that capsicum works its wonder not only when it is eaten but even if it is simply held in the mouth for a short time. In any event, the effect is rapid, and short-lived, disappearing in about 10 minutes. That may not sound like much, but even a temporary increase in FA might be enough to break up any little clots that are up to no good. But that’s only half the story. While it’s heating up FA, capsicum also produces a temporary reduction in the coagulability of blood, making it less likely that any clots will be created in the first place.
In Thailand, most people consume capsicum as a seasoning with every meal, which means that they are getting a kind of arterial cleanup three times a day. “This daily stimulation of fibrinolytic activity is perhaps sufficient to prevent thromboembolism among the majority of such consumers,” the doctors suggest. And while admitting that their work is “only a preliminary study,” they speculate that it may lead the way for drug manufacturers to “make considerable advances in the production of ideal drugs for prevention and treatment of thromboembolism” (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, June, 1982).
If the thought of munching on hot peppers a couple of times a day for the rest of your life makes you imagine that it might be easier to have a thromboembolism, there is a way out. What you need is a large bag of onions and an economy-size tube of toothpaste. Because onions are one of the very few foods that, like capsicum, have demonstrated the ability to increase fibrinolytic activity. Onions have the additional property of being able to reduce elevated cholesterol levels, so like capsicum they’re two-fisted defenders of your arteries. For more about onions, see our discussion of them in “The Ten Most Practical Medicinal Herbs: How to Grow and Use Them,” which is part of the large entry
entitled HERBAL MEDICINE.
Completing our little team of fire-breathing heart helpers is garlic. Here’s a guy that doesn’t know when to quit. For starters, it stimulates lots of the fibrinolytic activity that dissolves blood clots before they get nasty. Arun Bordia, M.D., an Indian physician, has reported that when ten healthy volunteers took hefty doses of garlic oil for several months, the fibrinolytic activity of their blood eventually doubled. When garlic was discontinued, fibrinolysis gradually dropped back to its original level. A high level of fibrinolytic activity is especially important for people who have heart attacks—to prevent recurrences. Dr. Bordia gave garlic to one group who had suffered myocardial infarctions more than a year before; he started another group on garlic within 24 hours after their heart attacks. Here, too, garlic led to a swift, significant rise in fibrinolytic activity—”within a few hours,” Dr. Bordia said. For those patients in the crucial recovery period after their heart attacks (a second thrombosis, at that point, could easily be fatal), 10 days of garlic therapy led to a 63 percent increase in fibrinolysis. After 20 days, clot-dissolving activity had nearly doubled.
There are powerful drugs, of course, that can also reduce the tendency of the blood to clot. But those must be watched closely, to avoid side effects such as excessive bleeding. “In our studies,” Dr. Bordia noted, “administration of as much as 60 grams of crude garlic (the equivalent of some 20 cloves) daily for three months has led neither to side effects nor to a bleeding tendency. As such this herbal remedy seems to be clinically acceptable and safe.”
Dr. Bordia also found that garlic makes blood platelets less “sticky,” so they won’t get all jammed together in a clot so easily in the first place.
But that’s only part of the garlic story. Another Indian researcher has found that garlic helps lower cholesterol in the blood, singling out the especially harmful LDL (low-density lipoprotein) fraction for its chop job. The HDL (high-density lipoprotein) fraction of cholesterol, considered protective, is left alone.
High blood pressure is a frequent complicating factor in heart disease, and there’s the possibility that garlic can help here, too. When a physician described in the medical journal Lancet how he had successfully treated five hypertensive patients with garlic, a Greek physician wrote that his experience “caused little astonishment here. For many decades, garlic has been used in this country as an antihypertensive agent.”
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