If you want to improve your metabolic health, you need to eat whole, real food and build metabolically active muscle by exercising. These are common-knowledge things you’ve likely heard before.
But they don’t encapsulate all the ways you could help your heart.
Beyond the typical recommendations of sleep, stress management, and exercise, I wanted to take a closer look at the smaller, less widely known components of metabolic health. The following list includes practices with proven clinical benefits for your heart, and several of them may not have crossed your mind before.
Article Overview
- Four clinically-backed but lesser-known habits that support your heart health include donating blood, heat and cold exposure, caffeine intake, and practicing gratitude.
- It’s helpful to layer these practices into your existing routine rather than overhauling everything at once.
- Be sure to find a doctor who ‘gets it’ to avoid the risks of improper practice, such as incorrect heat and cold exposure or caffeine overconsumption.
Unusual ways to improve your heart health
The following techniques act as a ‘plus’ to anyone journeying toward better metabolic health. These are potential optimizations, please don’t consider them replacements for the basics I outlined above. Without a solid foundation in place, these four activities won’t move the needle on your metabolic health.
1. Donating blood
This may come as somewhat of a surprise, but donating blood can have a net positive impact on your heart.
For one thing, giving blood provides you with a mini health analysis. Each time you give, you fill out a mini self-report health questionnaire. Plus, technicians check your weight, blood pressure, pulse, temperature, and iron count. Many also screen you for infections like hepatitis V, C, and E, as well as HIV and syphilis. This is helpful information to know, and you technically get paid to provide it as well.
Beyond that, there is quite a bit of evidence that regular blood donations may help lower blood pressure, decrease arterial stiffness, and improve blood flow and circulation.
It may also offer some cardioprotective effects. Case in point: studies show blood donors who give once per year have an 88% lower risk of a heart attack.
2. Heat and cold exposure
You’ve likely seen videos of influencers bathing in ice, or performing workout routines in saunas, in an effort to be ‘healthy.’ And while the jury might be out on these more extreme examples, we do know specific exposures to heat and cold can have therapeutic value for the heart.
For example, brief and controlled exposure to cold via showers and baths can trigger adaptive changes that are beneficial to heart health. This includes:
- Improved vascular function. Controlled cold exposure can enhance blood vessel elasticity and endothelial function.
- Decreased inflammation. This includes systemic inflammation markers historically associated with heart disease.
- Balanced autonomics. Regular cold stress can help increase your body’s parasympathetic activity and positively affect heart rate variability. This is your heart’s ability to respond to changing physical demands, as well as a major component of longevity.
- Improved adaptation to stress. Regular cold exposures may train your body to respond more effectively to stress.
On the other end of the spectrum, brief, controlled exposure to heat via saunas and very warm baths can also improve blood vessel function and improve stress management. Regular heat exposure (specifically via saunas) is also associated with lower instances of heart disease and stroke.
That said, you must be aware of the side effects for improper cold and heat exposure, such as vasoconstriction, increased heart rate, and temporary blood pressure spikes. These are particularly deleterious for people with existing heart disease. I recommend talking to a doctor who ‘gets it’ before implementing a routine.
3. Caffeine supplementation
Many of us have a love-hate relationship with caffeine, whether as part of our daily diets or as a performance or weight loss supplement. At the same time, caffeine is a natural stimulant and not a poison, and some studies suggest there is an amount that may possibly provide cardiovascular benefits.
One study found that caffeine may improve endothelial cell function, which can help regulate the tone of your blood vessels (i.e., clot resistance) and protect against arterial damage. Still others have correlated moderate caffeine consumption with reduced risks of heart disease and stroke. Regular consumption may lead to decreased blood pressure and reduced heart rate effects.
But again, these benefits are observed under proper consumption limits. Adults are safe to consume approximately 400mg of caffeine per day, which roughly equates to four or five cups of coffee.
And, if you’re asking me, resist using synthesized or non-natural forms of caffeine. You may want to think twice about your energy drink habit, for example.
4. Practicing gratitude
Social media influencers and TV producers have discovered a very unfortunate truth: human beings can’t look away from negativity. We increasingly find ourselves glued to our screens, even though we were never designed to do so. Negativity seems to be everywhere these days, and it takes very little to get overstimulated and stressed.
But beyond the mental effects of negativity, did you know it could also affect your heart? Learning to manage this onslaught of negativity, particularly by practicing gratitude, could have immensely positive effects on your health.
One study found that people who journaled about things they were grateful for (as opposed to things that “irritated or hassled them”) improved biomarkers related to heart failure morbidity. They slept better, felt less depressed, and said they had better self-efficacy to maintain their heart health.
A follow-up study found that heart failure patients who journaled gratitude each week improved their markers too.
You can learn more about the role of gratitude in chronic disease here.
Learn more ways to improve your heart health
There’s a lot of information about how to improve your heart health here, but perhaps too much information if you try to do everything all at the same time.
I’d suggest starting with whatever feels most accessible, then slowly stacking more habits until you build an optimal routine.
My latest book, Stay Off My Kitchen Table, also dives into optimizing your health with behaviors that you probably haven’t heard discussed much. Focusing on the food we eat, it challenges the orthodoxy that calories are all that matter, showing instead the crucial role of bioavailability — in other words, we need to eat foods with nutrition that our bodies can absorb. Modern diets are severely lacking in this area, and we see the consequences in the obesity, poor metabolic health, inflammation, and general poor health of the nation.